


The Hardest Truth

by stardust_made



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, Character-focused, Domestic, First Time, M/M, Post-episode 15x08, Romance, Slash, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:21:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 28,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21999655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: "The elation of being topside is wearing off and Adam feels murky with the aftertaste of it, energy leaving his body so abruptly it’s only the presence of a celestial being inside of him that stops him from toppling over his own feet."Adam and Michael leave Lebanon and start on a new journey together. Adam's POV.
Relationships: Michael & Adam Milligan, Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 180
Kudos: 302





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Taking a break from publishing original fiction after these two grabbed me by the heart with just a few scenes together. I have a character arc and a rough plan how to build it but no clue how many chapters it will take or what scenes it may involve. So, tags will be added where necessary. Eventually, it's Michael/Adam but I haven't decided on the rating yet.
> 
> I finish all my WIPs (with one notable exception where I still believe I'll wrap it up one day) so it's a relatively safe bet I won't leave you hanging - but it's not a 100% guarantee. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this and here's to more Michael and Adam in the remaining episodes of the last season.
> 
> My deepest gratitude to my best friend, writing partner and beta [Canon_Is_Relative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative) for spotting the little things that make a big difference and for her uplifting enthusiasm about the story.

Adam steps out into the drizzle and flinches at the sound of the bunker door closing behind him. The wind brushing his skin is chillier, much chillier; the air is so crisp and clear, a headache blooms between his eyes as he keeps staring at the nondescript scenery in front of them.  
  
“Michael?” he says out loud, shivering with cold and something else.  
  
It takes a moment but then it comes – the translucent sheet that makes the material world there and not-there, allowing for Adam’s existence without the threat of madness.  
  
He spares a moment to boggle at life’s self-upmanship. In ten short earth years, feeling possessed by an archangel is now sanity.  
  
If Michael knows his thoughts, he doesn’t comment on them. Adam reaches for him in his mind, an instinct rather than a gesture of intent.  
  
He finds the wall but it’s different from what he knows. This is not for his own protection. It isn’t for Michael’s either. Adam stays still, waiting for understanding to come to him. He is good at that, a regular Zen master. He knows Michael. Understanding will come.  
  
He closes his eyes and frowns slowly. The wall. It’s just _there_.  
  
“Where to?” Michael says. “You are getting wet and cold.”  
  
That wouldn’t be a problem and they both know it but maybe Michael is preparing him for the one day soon when Adam won’t have him around to make him better. He opens his eyes abruptly and rivulets run into them, making him blink fast. The scenery is a different kind of blur now and he cannot wait to leave Lebanon.  
  
“Wisconsin,” he tells Michael and braces himself for the spin.  
  
“Why?” Michael asks. He is ready to zap them out of there so Adam wonders whether this is a courtesy question or genuine curiosity.  
  
“Because nothing ever happens in Wisconsin.”  
  
He feels the indescribable flood that takes over his mind and body whenever he and his very own archangel find themselves being both two and one. It’s not synergy – that’s different. Adam suspects what it is but it is too profoundly human so he leaves it without a name. He is content to know Michael feels it too.  
  
***  
  
They find a mid-sized town some thirty miles away from Wisconsin’s capital. Adam is not above asking Michael to mind-bend a few people into believing Adam was the model tenant who has the means to pay for the two-bedroom, slightly rundown house facing a cornfield—and a spectacular sunset if the first evening there is anything to go by. He has every intention to get a job and send money where money is due but it is nice when things just happen without any effort on his part. The elation of being topside is wearing off and he feels murky with the aftertaste of it, energy leaving his body so abruptly it’s only the presence of a celestial being inside of him that stops him from toppling over his own feet.  
  
“You really are looking for a little job?” Michael’s voice never sounds like Adam’s anyway but the difference is rarely more pronounced than when Michael is doing the Air Quotes of Mockery.  
  
Adam rolls his eyes and continues to frown at the paper. Fewer job ads than back in the day, much fewer. Is it the economy? Is it the state? Does he have the wrong paper?  
  
“We can live a lawless life, then,” he tells Michael distractedly.  
  
“Doesn't bother me.”  
  
Adam looks up, then rolls his eyes again. “How about cheating is immoral?”  
  
Michael considers his words. “You mean the people we don’t pay will suffer consequences.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
There is something in Michael’s eyes – both Adam’s and entirely not – which Adam recognizes a split second before it goes out in anguished flames.  
  
They are sitting at the kitchen bar by the east window and having an early lunch. Adam fried some eggs and made toast. He’s having pickles too. It’s the most unsuitably mundane setting for what he is about to say but the wall doesn’t feel as solid as it has these past couple of days and he is not a frigging stage manager.  
  
He swallows. “Just because your Father was a fraud doesn’t mean what he commanded isn’t right.” Theology was never his thing and he wasn’t even that religious, before all this. He doesn’t know what he is now. He has beliefs. Do no harm. His own perspective on harm is so wildly scrambled he sometimes wants to weep but the simple things, they’ve got to still stand as they were. “Do no harm,” he speaks into the quiet.  
  
Michael shudders, his anger bitter in Adam’s mouth. He disappears, leaving Adam with a crate of loneliness right in his core that a ton of eggs and pickles cannot fill.  
  
***  
  
He asked Michael once, eons ago, whether Michael had ever interfered with Adam’s mind.  
  
The Cage was both a physical and metaphysical space. While the latter remained the same – a feeling of constraint and disconnectedness that terrified beyond all else – the former changed shape. It was never anything nice, never, but there were times when it was just a plain room with four plain walls and a window with the curtains drawn in; Adam always knew never to try to open them. In the room, there was a bed and a nightstand, a small couch and an armchair. Some shelves were attached to the walls with objects Adam remembered from different homes he’d visited or lived in during his life. There had been a trophy from a spelling bee, a picture of his mother, a few DVDs, a porcelain figurine of a deer and her fawn which he finally managed to place as something he’d seen at his mother’s mother’s home – his grandma who passed away when Adam was only six.  
  
The third or fourth time he found himself in the room, he was a step up from utter despondency so he went exploring. There had been books on the shelves too and one on the nightstand. He picked it up, heart throbbing with something good for the first time since they’d all fallen into that goddamn hole.  
  
He found the pages filled with nonsensical letters. They looked like words, the words like sentences but no matter how his brain strained he couldn’t find any meaning.  
  
He stared at them, at first befuddled then falling again, falling and falling. He started picking up the rest of the books from the shelf, opening them feverishly and seeing the same congregation of letters that meant nothing, discarding them on the floor one after the other until he threw the last one against the wall. The black rows of ink had turned into serpents running along the pages and leaping at him, hissing and cackling. He screamed in the middle of the room until he was exhausted and collapsed on the floor.  
  
He felt Michael’s rage still thrumming all around him when he came back to consciousness. He was on the floor in what had been the most common appearance of the Cage to date – a cage. Sam was a reddish slump of ragged flesh and spirit in one corner, simultaneously close and very far, and Lucifer was in the corner across, eyes like burning coal, a man, a serpent, a monster all at once. He was staring up at Michael who towered over all of them in the fourth corner, Adam and not-Adam – so luminous in the carmine darkness that Adam had to close his eyes.  
  
“You never let me play with your toys,” he heard Lucifer say.  
  
“Do not meddle, brother. Do not.”  
  
The next time Adam found himself in the room, the books and DVDs were gone. So when he asked Michael if he’d ever interfered with his mind, Michael’s reply brought him resigned comfort.  
  
_I am never going to be myself again_ , Adam had thought, _so what are a few erased memories and a few fabricated perceptions.  
_  
“You came here of your own will,” Michael had answered, “but only with the understanding allowed to you by your puny human mind. I am not cruel.”  
  
***  
  
It turns out the best way to find a job these days is online or on foot, looking at businesses’ windows. Adam walks around and finds a job in a café. Michael makes the two women who run it believe Adam is God’s gift to customers. God hasn’t made any gifts to anyone, looks like, and Michael has been trying to give Adam gifts forever. Adam smiles at him as they leave the café and feels Michael’s echoing smile like a sunbeam.  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Wisconsin lives up to what Adam hoped it would be: day after day he goes to work, watches TV and eats, with nothing eventful taking place either during or outside of those things.   
  
Michael stays with him most of the time and they talk, in the space of Adam’s head, sometimes even while Adam’s serving customers. It should be disorienting but it isn’t – best Adam can tell, it’s as if their conversations take place in-between units of time. They stay quiet in the evenings in front of the TV, with the odd commentary from Adam on things Michael doesn’t even ask about. Occasionally Michael does have questions; some of them expected, some as bizarre as they come.  
  
‘If people know smoking can seriously damage their health why do they keep doing it?’  
  
‘Who decides the weather has become too dangerous for an airplane to land?’  
  
‘What is the purpose of good manners?’  
  
‘Why are cartoon ducklings yellow?’  
  
With Adam as the conduit, Michael’s understanding of humans must be of a species that’s pretty dumb and irrational; but they’ve always been honest with each other and Adam isn’t about to change that just so humanity can save face.   
  
There is no news on the God front or the Winchester front, which last he knew was headed towards being the same thing. Adam is all right with that. It’s not that he doesn’t ever want to see his half-brothers again. He believed Dean’s sincerity when he offered the Winchesters’ apology to Adam. It’s just that things are never quiet with those two and really, all that being around them does for Adam is remind him that he is not Sam or Dean. They have a special way of excluding you even when they mean you well, even when you are their actual flesh and blood. He doesn’t relish the feeling. He can name some who, while different from him in orders of cosmic magnitude, still manage to reach him, pull him in.  
  
It doesn’t seem like Michael is overwrought about their lackadaisical life, either.   
  
He mentions something about Angel Radio a couple of weeks after they move into their new home. He’s been hearing it all along, Adam is surprised to find out, but it seems there’s nothing beyond a loop message calling for help. Evidently, Heaven is in disrepair. Angels fell from grace some years ago and the place hasn’t recovered. Wars between factions before and after that event have brought Heaven to its knees and the message is one of despair.   
  
Adam suggests to Michael that he go up there, take the reins. He does it because he likes to think of himself as a stand-up dude, looking after his bro’s best interest. The thought of Michael actually leaving makes him want to jump in a hole in the ground. He carefully shrouds that thought.  
  
“Maybe one day,” Michael replies to his question-slash-suggestion.   
  
“They’ll greet you like a Heaven sent... You know what I mean.” Adam smirks. “You’re a mighty warrior, Michael. Angels are warriors. Maybe you need them as much as they need you.”  
  
“To do what?”  
  
“I don’t know…Lead them?”   
  
“On what quest? On whose orders?”  
  
“Yours?”  
  
“I don’t have them. My Father gave me my orders.” Michael glares at him. Adam has no real fear of him left, apart from a small corner of his soul where Michael feels like a storm that could swallow Adam whole. It’s always been a complicated feeling; it’s appropriately electric. Adam leaves it well enough alone.  
  
He doesn’t do that with the conversation though. He is arguing with Michael for his own benefit as well as Michael’s – nothing is worse than the unknown.   
  
“Maybe if you’re among your kind, then your,” Adam hesitates, “I don’t know, vision? Your vision of Heaven, your mission, will come to you?”  
  
Michael doesn’t reply for a long while, pacing up and down their small living room. It’s slow, too measured. Adam picks up a bag of chips and shoves a few into his mouth, munching at them. Michael stops and throws him an incredulous glance over his shoulder. Adam drops the bag to his lap and lifts his hands apologetically, then quickly finishes what’s in his mouth. The crunching sound is no less ridiculous. Michael throws his head back in exasperation.  
  
“I don’t want to go to Heaven,” he says later. They’re watching a wildlife documentary about penguins. Adam’s eyes are closing and he thinks tomorrow, he is going to T.J. Maxx and buying a goddamn cozy blanket for the couch.  
  
He turns to Michael who looks comfortable next to him, even though he definitely doesn’t have a cozy blanket. “No?”  
  
Michael shrugs, eyes on the screen. “If it were still my home, I would. It isn’t. Neither is this.” His aura changes in a blink of an eye, a deluge of icy strandedness making Adam’s hairs stand on end.   
  
The stupidest, most clichéd reply pops into Adam’s mind, undoubtedly the product of popular culture unleashed upon the unsuspecting brains of children in western civilization. The words never leave his mouth but he flinches when he imagines what Michael would make of their maudlin human sentiment.  
  
 _‘Home is where the heart is.’_

***

It isn’t the result of planning or preparation, and it shows – Adam’s spontaneous quest to renovate the house starts taking up nearly all his free time.   
  
“You know I can just have it all done up in an instant?” Michael tells him a few times, with various degrees of emphasis corresponding to the degrees of frustration emanating from Adam.  
  
“Yeah, yeah,” Adam replies each time, until one day he kicks a bag with all his force and his foot encounters a wrench inside of it. “Son of a bitch!” he yells hopping on one foot and nursing the other, “what’s the stupid wrench even doing in the house?”  
  
Michael heals him, then says, later, in the quiet, “I can have it done up _and_ it can look exactly the way you like it, kid.”  
  
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’” Adam grouses. He expects, ‘Then stop acting like one!’ – a timely retort if there ever was one, but Michael only throws him an inscrutable look and nods.   
  
Adam returns to his renovation projects but now takes the time to research what he is actually supposed to do before doing it. He also asks Michael to fix a couple of things. There simply cannot be a wall in the bedroom; that closet has to go but what with the roof in danger of collapsing, Michael gets to do some structural reinforcement.  
  
The rest of the time, he sits around and watches Adam work. Sometimes it’s in silence, sometimes they talk. It’s a familiar way of being around each other – neither does well being completely alone for long stretches of a time.  
  
“Why did you really choose Wisconsin?” Michael asks him one day. He is having a beer. He isn’t having a beer, of course – Archangels don’t have beer. He probably thinks it’s quaint. Adam’s money is on good old-fashioned teasing. He himself is sweating through his t-shirt already, sanding a wooden beam he got in there just because with all the glory of his ‘puny human brain’ he thought it would look nice. How hard could it be to sand it off and reapply varnish, right?  
  
Very, if your arms look like chicken wings.  
  
“I’m going to start working out,” Adam says in lieu of reply, panting, then adds warningly, “Don’t tell me you can give me muscles.”  
  
Michael chuckles and takes a swig of his beer. Adam keeps sanding and goes into a meditative state where he marvels, for the millionth time, how it is possible to look at Michael’s face and be aware, rationally, it is Adam Milligan’s face, but see it as someone else’s, so completely. He doesn’t know how to describe the other person, or the experience. The best he’s come up with is that it’s much like in a dream when he encounters his mother but while he knows with all his heart who that is, she doesn’t look like his mom in real life at all.  
  
“Seriously.” Michael pulls him out of his reverie. “Why Wisconsin?”  
  
Adam stretches up with a groan and takes a moment to roll his neck. It feels so good. He has a fleeting fantasy of asking Michael for a massage. If you open portals to other dimensions with a snap of your fingers, you’ve got to be able to knead flesh like a pro with those same fingers. He bows his head in a useless attempt to hide his twitching lips. Michael sees his Being, not just his face. Oftentimes Michael is privy to everything that goes on with him. But body language is so hardwired into humans, even back in the Cage Adam would turn his back on Michael and feel he had accomplished something.  
  
“I told you why,” he finally replies. “Nothing ever happens here. I thought we could both do with some of that.”  
  
“And?” Michael deadpans in a beat.   
  
Adam sighs. He walks over and sits on the floor next to the armchair Michael is occupying, back propped against the footrest. He knows the chair is empty but he also trusts the sensation of his shoulder brushing Michael’s calf.   
  
He folds his hands and stares at them, at the roughness of the skin, the spots that are so dry, fine white flecks are covering them. Manual work, what a novelty.   
  
“I wanted to be someplace familiar,” he confesses quietly. “I was…scared, I guess. I haven’t—I know Minnesota and I know Wisconsin. Haven’t been around much.” He feels the weight of Michael’s gaze on the back of his head and turns to look at him.  
  
“You were very young,” Michael concludes.   
  
Adam shrugs. It’s the truth.   
  
“When I took you, you were very young,” Michael repeats, leaving Adam thrown off; badly, badly thrown off.  
  
They don’t talk about the genesis of their union. It was never a spoken part of their agreement but it’s as mutual as the rest of it. The agreement could only work if they got rid of anything that could trip a switch, threaten their good will towards each other. The good will of a human being – the only thing no angel, even the almighty Archangel Michael, can take at their own will. That’s something else they never talk about, whether Michael chose to let him be because he didn’t have the option to force the good will out of Adam. Adam thinks he knows the answer but he can’t risk it, he just can’t.  
  
“You didn’t take me,” he braves an answer of his own. He’s going in blind – it’s exhilarating, much to his shock. “I came with you, willingly. I said yes, remember.”  
  
Michael’s eyes travel over his features and, mystified, Adam’s heart speeds up in his chest. “I do remember,” Michael tells him. “I remember a boy, a youth, so simple and…ordinary. If I ever came close to my misguided brother’s beliefs, if I ever questioned my Father’s judgement in his self-professed love for humans, it was then.”  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
Michael doesn’t take the proffered way out, doesn’t smile back. His gaze is still riveted on Adam, encompassing his face, his chicken arms, the dry spots on his hands, his undulating heart. “My Father lied about so much…” Michael speaks as if his jaws are clamped together by his own might. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”  
  
“Well…” Adam can feel his simple, ordinary face pull a simple, ordinary grimace of consideration. “You get to choose what to believe. To be honest, I’m not so sure myself if we as a species are worth protecting. Look at the planet, seriously. But you know…Life is sacred and all that. It’s got to be worth giving it some thought, right?”  
  
“Yours is.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Your life is worth protecting,” Michael clarifies.  
  
“Yeah, I’m your vessel and Dean calls you ‘Mike,’ so I don’t think you’re getting another shot with your true vessel.” Adam turns his face away and makes to stand up but Michael reaches out and stops him with a hand on his shoulder.   
  
“There is nothing true anymore. The only things I cannot doubt are the things that already are. You are my vessel, Adam. I could leave you and go to Heaven but I would still protect you.” Michael’s voice has no inflection to it, it’s the same deep, clear, dark river of vowels and consonants it always is when he is calm. Adam still doesn’t dare turn to look at him.   
  
The fingers on his shoulders dig in gently, then slide up to his neck and press there. Adam’s eyes fall shut and he doesn’t care one whit when he lets the word flutter from his mind to Michael’s: _divine_.  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

It is only when Michael takes full control without any warning that Adam realizes it’s been a month since he has done it. They have fallen into a routine where Adam is behind the wheel all the time, Michael content to observe the minutiae of human existence from the passenger seat. That he is content and not just appearing so Adam is sure of – though he still senses the barrier, that wall he found in Lebanon, he also feels it as something that has nothing to do with him. He and Michael are as connected as they have been for years. They have meals together where they talk, they go shopping together where they also talk, they watch TV and movies together in companionable silence. They take trips together, further and further away, even if it is by little – on them, they stay in silence or they talk, both as organic as breathing.  
  
Michael listens, ninety percent of the time. Adam is under no illusion that he is such a master storyteller but he’s holding enough of his companions attention to be modestly proud and uncomplicatedly happy. Whatever is driving Michael’s questions – idle curiosity, deep desire to understand, or the simple need to fill his head with noise – Adam won’t press. Michael is there, with him, and Adam himself is content to keep waking up and going to work; re-discovering all the incredible little freedoms that make his life such a stunning canopy of variety and joy. Things are good.  
  
Until they walk into their home and find an intruder standing in front of the kitchen windows, bearing a perfunctory resemblance to Castiel. It’s enough to have Adam’s heart jump in his throat, then the wave is rising...  
  
That’s how Michael taking possession has always felt, from the very first time in that opulent room. A tide sweeping Adam up, carrying him high and fast, hurtling past stars; it lasts a second or two and he is always left awash on a shore. It doesn’t matter which way they’re going, whether Michael lets him be the driver or puts him in the passenger seat – on that shore Adam is always safe. He has not once been afraid; even that first time, he felt beyond fear. You can’t be afraid of the sun rising and setting. It is the most inevitable, self-explanatory experience in existence, for every time Michael takes charge, Adam surrenders to destiny.  
  
What comes after, he compares it to watching a movie. It’s like 3D, but with feelings – Michael doesn’t hide from him.  
  
They are in their kitchen now, facing an angel who looks like a bank clerk. Michael, of course, sees something different. Adam is not that much of a dumbass as to ask to see through Michael’s eyes.  
  
The angel bows his head. “Viceroy.”  
  
“Who are you?” Michael would make an awesome poker player if he ever found betting less pointless. “I don’t recognize you.”  
  
“I am new, my Lord. We were created by the Nephilim, a group of fifteen of—”  
  
“What is your name?”  
  
“Nigel.”  
  
Michael frowns. “Nigel? Your name is Nigel.”  
  
“Yes, my Lord.” Nigel shifts from foot to foot. “We kept our vessels’ names. Nigel, Sean, Stephanie—”  
  
Michael lifts his hand and Nigel stops talking instantly.  
  
“Why have you come here?”  
  
Nigel makes to move forward, an aborted gesture that looks all the more eager for it. “I’ve come to plead with you, my Lord. We are desperate for leadership. The news of your return has given us all hope. We, the new angels, I mean. Our old brothers and sisters, they…” Nigel struggles, eyes jumping away from Michael’s face. “They are confused. They are overwhelmed. They are trying to teach us but there’s been…” Adam feels pity for the poor guy – and if that’s their elected speaker, he feels pity for Heaven itself. “There’s been a lot of miscommunication,” Nigel finishes.  
  
Michael regards Nigel and a word Castiel had used to penetrate his implacable veneer floats in Adam’s mind: _haughty_. “This is of no concern to me.”  
  
This time Nigel does take a step forward. “Sire, some of my new brothers smite people without proper procedure. The chain of command is broken and orders get lost, or crossed. It’s a few isolated cases now but I fear what’s to come. We have managed to keep people’s individual heavens running.” A shimmer of pride in Nigel’s voice. “I work there. We work very hard, my Lord, but I fear one day soon one of my more…incompetent new brothers or sisters will do something irrevocable.”  
  
Michael moves and Nigel freezes, stares ahead, while Michael starts stalking in a semi-circle in front of him. “You have retained some of your humanity,” he comments, curious. “How is that possible?”  
  
“Oh. No.” The angel smiles. “It’s Nigel. He and I…we’re friends. Our souls were forged into one. Our Maker didn’t seem to—Well, he wasn’t God,” Nigel says plainly. Adam is pressed into his metaphorical seat by the emotion the word alone evokes in Michael.  
  
Meanwhile, Nigel continues. “For some of us, the forging of our angel grace with our human counterpart’s soul means we are like two sides of a coin. Two peas in a pod. Two legs of one person.”  
  
“I got it.” Michael stands in front of Nigel, looking at him squarely in the face. “You should leave.”  
  
“My Lord, we are all still angels, we are pure.” Adam isn’t particularly species-proud but he flinches at the choice of adjective. What, humans are dirty? Their souls must have been good enough to fuse or forge or whatever with the grace of an angel. Goddamn racial bigotry.  
  
“Enough,” Michael snaps and Adam’s thoughts grind to a halt before he realizes the command was directed at Nigel, not him.  
  
Michael is looking at Adam over his shoulder, a line between his eyebrows, but then he turns to speak to the angel. “Leave. Tell everyone in Heaven I am not to be bothered.”  
  
Adam rarely prods Michael into action but when he must, he must. “Come on, man, you’ve got to do something more.”  
  
Michael glares at him. “I really don’t.”  
  
Adam points at Nigel with both his hands, palms wide open. “Look at the poor dude. He’s scared shitless and he still came to talk to you. Just send them some message. Anything.”  
  
Michael contemplates him, then grinds his teeth. “You are a pain in my ass.”  
  
“Happy to help.” Adam gives him a beatific smile.  
  
To all outward appearance, Michael has been standing immobile where he was, piercing gaze fixed on Nigel’s face. Without a muscle twitching in his own, he now tells him: “I repeat – I am not to be bothered. But,” he adds after a beat, “if I hear anything about new angels smiting again, I _will_ consider it being bothered. Very much so.” He bores his eyes into Nigel’s. “Tell everyone to keep people’s heavens running as smoothly as they were when I was there.”  
  
“Yes, my Lord.” Nigel’s throat sounds parched. He is dithering before he finds his last reserves of courage. “Viceroy, we’ve heard rumors that our Father has become...”  
  
“Be gone!”  
  
Nigel disappears, his expression that of panic and relief.  
  
Adam gives it a minute then gets up and moves to stand behind Michael’s still form. “Heaven sounds like a hot mess,” he says conversationally. Not much point feeding into Michael’s brooding, the guy’s a champ with no help at all.  
  
“Not my concern.” Michael is glaring straight ahead. He is still beautiful.  
  
“Yeah, heard that already.” Adam lifts a finger. “Sorry, sounds like it is.”  
  
“It is not. I am not Heaven’s viceroy, no matter what that infant called me. Nigel.” Michael shakes his head. “This is what I find,” he murmurs, no longer to Adam, so Adam hesitantly places a hand on his shoulder, then walks to the fridge to start making some dinner.  
  
He has always known when to keep his mouth shut with Michael. Adam being let in to listen, it’s never for Michael’s benefit. It’s a gesture. They’re in this together; Michael has always acted in tune to that if not in awareness. Every single time he’s left Adam unconscious while possessing him, he’s had a good reason. Adam wasn’t conscious when they fell – he only has Michael’s memory of it and access to that was hard won. ‘I shielded you,’ Michael had repeated again and again. ‘It wasn’t your fight. You didn’t need to see me kill my brother, you didn’t need to feel his wrath.’  
  
But Adam had insisted – nagged, his mother would have said – until one day Michael yielded and showed Adam the events surrounding the fall. But not what had gone through his head, through his soul.  
  
Later that day, after early dinner, Nigel forgotten, Adam is fiddling with the remote of the goddamn fireplace feeling like a monkey with an electric drill when Michael suddenly speaks.  
  
“My Father left us all.” He sounds weary to the bone. “His Kingdom is in shambles. My brothers are dead, and for no good reason from what I can tell. Our Father’s amusement. I still deplore Lucifer, I resent his betrayal, but I was sent to kill him, my little brother, for the same purpose. God’s entertainment. Lucifer let us all down but was he wrong about Him?” Michael’s eyes are searching his and in a flash, Adam is amazed to discover that he is expected to answer. Things are hanging in the balance and he is the one being asked to tip the scales.  
  
He reaches and tries to steady them instead. “Michael, look. I know you shielded me from Lucifer, from what he did to Sam, from what he wanted to do to me when Sam left the Cage. But I don’t need the memories, man. I don’t need the tales of Satan, either, from before I died.” Adam walks to Michael’s chair and crouches in front of him. “Lucifer was wrong in everything he stood for.”  
  
“You didn’t know him.”  
  
“The way you did? No, you’re right, I didn’t. But people change. Or maybe what was in him was always there. He loved hurting people. Hurting them bad. Maybe God did make him that way.” Adam shrugs. “At some point you’ve got to stop asking yourself why, or you’ll go insane. Lucifer was who he was and he didn’t back off. Was he right about your Father? So what if he was? A broken clock is still right twice in a day.”  
  
Michael is hanging on to his every word. He smells like summer storm. Looks like one, too. His eyes roam Adam’s features and awareness of how close they are floods Adam, incongruous. They share a body, they shared the Cage but he feels it now, with his very human senses – Michael is so near. If Adam pulls away, he’ll land on his ass, and he isn’t even sure he wants to pull away.  
  
“You and your human wisdom,” Michael tells him eventually, lines around his eyes softening.  
  
Adam tilts his head and stands up, graceless. “Like I said – happy to help.” He puts his hands on his hips and looks at the fireplace. “Can you just…just snap your fingers and make it happen? All right? Please?”


	4. Chapter 4

It took a long, long time for Adam to realize the glimpses he was catching of Sam’s physical form in the Cage were just projections of Lucifer’s mind, his very own virtual Sam doll. It was probably for the best. Adam didn’t take it especially well when he learned that someone had come to fetch Sam, conveniently forgetting about Adam; to have been aware it happened so early after the fall wouldn’t have done him any good. Topside, hope was a gift. In Hell, hope would have made for an excellent boulder around Adam’s neck.  
  
Maybe it’s just Adam’s character. He’d rather take things at their grim face value and be pleasantly surprised than rise and shine every day only to have his light extinguished by nightfall.  
  
When Sam’s soul departed too, that was when it got bad for him, really bad. He knew it wasn’t Sam’s demise that made him disappear. Sam had been saved – Lucifer’s rage testified to that. It shook the Cage; whatever shape the place took for Adam, he had to sit on the ground and hold on to any illusion of sturdiness. He would hear him roar, nothing like he’d seen in movies or even heard from him by then. It was all around, in Dolby Surround; it was in Adam’s gut making him struggle to contain his stomach.

No soul in Hell was left in doubt Lucifer was pissed but it felt personal to Adam too. It felt as if the roar was reaching up and taking hold of his entire body, a vibration carried up tissue and sinew like the unravelling of a domino line. Adam tried to tell himself he was getting paranoid; he reasoned that living next door to Satan, you were bound to be terrified and imagine things.  
  
When the Cage started looking like a cage and all he could do was watch Lucifer and Michael staring into each other, a faceoff in cosmic suspension, Adam, again, took a while to figure things out. Things such as why Michael could no longer afford him the small protections: a neutral-looking physical space, or a wall between Adam and the Devil. The Archangel had needed all of his power to confront his brother’s madness. He had none left to spare for Adam’s little comforts.  
  
It went on for days or years, Adam couldn’t tell. He would fall in and out of time, half-lucid, unsure whether he was finally dying or Michael hadn’t been saving a spark for him after all so he could snap his fingers and put Adam to sleep.  
  
He didn’t dare to ask. He didn’t talk to Michael in all that time. They hadn’t exactly been buddies before but they had conversed. They had been around each other – more and more Michael had shared Adam’s space. Adam was missing him, at least of that he was aware quite quickly. But he had also never been more afraid of him, not since the very first time Michael had ascended, spreading his wings and in Adam’s mind’s eye, it was if all the rays of the sun made up his feathers.  
  
During the Michael-Lucifer standoff, Adam only heard Michael speak to Lucifer with human words once.  
  
“Well, you will have to bear it, brother!” Michael had said, grim and angry. “Lucifer, you were weak. You let Sam Winchester take hold of you and now we are both here. You brought us here, and now you have the audacity to want him, my vessel? You shall not have him.”  
  
“I need him more than you do.” Lucifer had pleaded and Adam’s petrified heart ceased to beat for one long moment when he thought: his big brother would cave.  
  
But Michael didn’t. Lucifer’s fury erupted again, accusing Michael in turn for his own weakness, for ‘playing house with a hairless ape.’  
  
It all ended mysteriously, while Adam was unconscious. He woke up from a nightmare, no detail left behind, just black smoke filling him until he was choking and shivering. It went on and on, even though he was awake. He couldn’t shake it off and his mind snapped, convinced it would never stop. He started crying, tears streaming down his face as he rocked back and forth, and he prayed for death, feverishly, wanting it as purely as he had clung to life every moment before that.  
  
He felt something envelop him at last, bringing peace so profound it felt as if someone had cut his strings and left Adam a boneless heap on the floor. He thought his prayers had been answered – this was Death. Death had taken pity and come back for him, not to save him but to end him. But he went on breathing and his clearing mind took stock of his surroundings. He found he was in Michael’s embrace.  
  
There was no thought that followed, not a single one. For a while he let himself be, knowing no pain and no future, no ecstasy and no memory. Michael’s touch was ephemeral yet it contained Adam as if it was material.  
  
He slept a dreamless sleep and when he woke up, he was still held, Michael’s face like а statue. Adam was rested, calm, and he could feel it now – a non-existent brush against his body, a blanket consisting of holes rather than of cloth.  
  
He looked up to search Michael’s eyes, trained ahead, unblinking – they were Adam’s own he had perceived at that moment. “You don’t have your wings here,” he told the angel, numb with understanding. “This is a memory of what it was like?”  
  
Michael didn’t lower his gaze to him. “Yes.”  
  
Regret had flooded Adam together with pity and he had reached and touched Michael for the first time, fingers to his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” When Michael hadn’t replied, Adam cast his mind around to ask another question. “Did you defeat him? How did you make him…stop? How do you have the power to keep him away now?”  
  
If they’d been anywhere else Adam would have called the flicker stealing over Michael’s features bitter-sweet. “I reached deeper than I ever have before,” Michael replied, finally meeting his eyes.  
  
***  
  
The ghouls are about to eat him alive after they’ve eaten his mom. Everything is insult _and_ injury, and Adam screams and screams.  
  
He wakes up sweating, his skin broken in goose bumps and his throat hoarse. Shimmering light cocoons him and he recognizes it instantly; beyond that, he has never forgotten the phantom touch of wings, feathered palms of grace cradling his mind as if it was something precious.  
  
“Michael,” he whispers.  
  
The bright darkness of the night in a small American town is back in the room. Michael is an outline at the far end of it, Adam’s own shape but not Adam, entirely not.  
  
“You haven’t had a nightmare since we left,” Michael says. Adam hangs his head between his shoulders and eventually shakes it in confirmation. “Or maybe I don’t remember them,” he mumbles.  
  
Michael doesn’t say anything and suddenly, the distance between them seems surreal, preposterous – a counterpoint to a need Adam has, something recondite. He feels bare beyond his naked torso; he misses Michael’s wings on his own back and all around him. He lifts his head and squints at the dark figure across from him. His need exists in a miasmic state and he lets it be, lets it find a shape.  
  
“Show me,” he says. “I want to see them, I want to see your wings.”  
  
His eyes have gotten used to the darkness and he is sure he doesn’t imagine the sharp lift of Michael’s head. Adam doesn’t look away, waits in a hush while euphoric anticipation builds up in him.  
  
The lightning and thunder are stretched out the way they never would be in nature just as Michael’s eyes are glowing in a blue no artist will ever be able to concoct. On the big white wall that appears behind him, his wings project a glorious shadow. They open and it’s as if Adam’s ribcage opens with them, two sides, two mirrors. Michael stands still, the grandeur of his wingspan rivaled only by the beauty of its shape.  
  
_Magnificent_ , Adam thinks, body shivering, covered again in goose bumps that Adam wants to keep, surrender to. “Magnificent,” he repeats out loud and another thunderclap shakes the world, silver light throwing Michael into relief once more, just for Adam.  
  
When it’s dark again and Adam can see the familiar outline of the book shelf behind Michael, he rests back against the pillows and pulls the covers up over his chest. A thought occurs to him that makes him feel spoiled and stupid but a little pleased with himself too.  
  
“Everyone in Heaven and Hell,” he remarks, then adds, “and in between, is probably wondering what that was about.”  
  
“Let them wonder. I am an Archangel. I don’t need a reason to be one.” Michael pauses at length. “I hadn’t done that since we escaped.”  
  
“Well.” Adam slides down under the covers. “A first for me, a first for you. Yours looked a lot better, I’ve got to say.”  
  
He watches Michael shift, then he is next to Adam on the bed, sitting, legs stretched out. Adam’s nostrils flare to seek the smell of storm, of myrrh and heaven, of the downiest feathers that shine like diamonds. His senses yearn to be fed, but even as it is, he is content to close his eyes and think: _He is awe itself, and he chose me – maybe not then but now, he is here right next to me._  
  



	5. Chapter 5

If there is anything Adam and Michael never do, it’s watch the news. He hears things at work – his two bosses are pretty invested in politics in a way that makes him respect them. They discuss community issues and LGBT issues and hate crimes, and only occasionally talk crap about the people up top responsible for the latter. Leslie and Carol, those are his bosses, seem to know more about local politics than he ever did, despite getting halfway through his higher education back in the day.  
  
Customers talk about the news too, though not to Adam – he overhears the odd comment here and there while he is serving them or bussing the tables. He deposits all such comments in the same place he does the rest of the news items that make their way past his filters. It’s like anything to do with life on Mars: real but irrelevant to his existence. The world, near and far, could be turned on its head at the drop of the hat. Apparently, God has had a mental breakdown. What’s the point in worrying? The wheel could land on another Apocalypse any day now, while God is spinning it.  
  
A cosmic upheaval could happen tomorrow to Adam personally, as evidenced by the fact that back in the day he was living the most unimaginative life possible, then next thing you know, he was being eaten by a monster. Or worse – one day he was minding his own business, being dead, the next he was being raised, or actually Raised, to become the Michael sword.  
  
He is the Michael sword. He is Michael’s vessel. He is Michael’s.  
  
A person’s perspective changes after something like that. The budget surplus might matter to millions of Americans and have ripples over the globe. The lake on whose shores Adam and Michael are watching by? Those ripples don’t reach there.  
  
Still, Adam tries to live his life in the ‘the real world.’ Michael could leave tomorrow. Someone could kill Michael tomorrow. Adam does his best not to think about that. He isn’t prone to flights of fancy, thank all that’s holy, he honestly doesn’t know how writers live with the curse of a rich imagination. It’s difficult not to be afraid all the time, when you know the things Adam does and when the stakes are as high as they are for him. By ‘stakes’ of course he means Michael. By ‘him,’ of course he means Michael. They are one, yet they are not: such are the murky waters where Adam might rather not go, but needs to be prepared to swim in.  
  
So he pays his bills and does his job, picks up some medical journals and takes Michael to garage sales... And he stores bits of news in a mental box like little physical items you keep in a special drawer because you never know when they might turn useful. But you don’t go looking for them.  
  
***  
  
In the end, even without watching the news, it affects his life. Adam keeps hearing mentions of Minnesota everywhere he turns so one evening, while they’re watching The Hobbit, he takes a long swig of his beer and says, “I’ve been thinking of going to Windom.”  
  
It’s been two months since they left the Cage.  
  
Michael averts his eyes from the screen. “You want to visit your old home.”  
  
Adam reaches for the remote and presses ‘pause’, then leans back and turns to Michael. Every move he makes feels drawn out in time; somehow, it ends up emphasizing how close they are sitting on the couch. “Yeah. I mean…” Adam shrugs, a silent, ‘why not?’  
  
Michael watches him for a moment. “All right,” he says, and two days later, they’re on their way.  
  
Minnesota is known as the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Adam informs Michael, but doesn’t tell him he had briefly entertained the idea of making this their retreat. He’d dismissed it when he stopped to consider who or what exactly would the two of them be retreating from.  
  
“Are there 10,000 lakes in the state?” Michael asks, a little impressed. Adam huffs a laugh. “Ah, yeah!” Adam has no idea how many exactly there are but this is fun. “That’s why it’s called _the land of 10,000 lakes_.”  
  
Michael’s glare in his direction only makes Adam’s lips stretch again. He is in a good mood. He hasn’t made any plans about where to take Michael, he’ll play it by ear. In his head, this has become a trip to show Michael where Adam used to live, which gives it a tangible purpose, which in turn may have something to do with quelling the tension in Adam’s chest.  
  
“There aren’t ten thousand lakes in Minnesota,” Michael says. “There are more.”  
  
Adam flashes him a grin. “Did you just count them?”  
  
“I’m an Archangel. I don’t need to count, I only need to look.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah. Show off.” They’re both smiling when their eyes meet this time, even if Michael’s trying to stay cool. Adam shifts a step up to starting to hum. “It’s actually what made me think of coming back, I came across a mention online about Minnesota having a beef with Wisconsin right now. Someone up the chain, a tourist board representative or something, said Wisconsin had more lakes than Minnesota, and that’s just asking for trouble.”  
  
“Being America’s Dairyland wasn’t enough,” Michael says, wise, and Adam snorts, delighted that an archangel would remember as little a detail as what it says on Adam’s Wisconsin-registered license plate – his and millions of Wisconsinites.  
  
They drive in silence for a while with Adam mourning the fact that, unlike the picturesque lakes, the lands of southern Minnesota leave a lot to be desired. Next to him, Michael’s profile is a danger to road safety and Adam forces himself to watch where they’re going. In a minute, Michael startles him.  
  
“My Father truly had scope,” he says quietly. “All the lakes in this part of the world… How whimsical.”  
  
“It is amazing,” Adam agrees. “We can go on a trip another time, book a cabin or something. Or buy a tent. John took me camping once, I can’t say I loved it but it had a lot to do with having to spend all that time alone with him. I was so nervous being out with him for a whole day and night, it took me a while to remember he wasn’t much of a talker.”  
  
Adam’s lip curls and he shakes his head.  
  
“It got better after that, I kind of liked the quiet and the view. We went to Lake Washington. That’s back home in Wisconsin actually. It was cold, didn’t matter my mom had packed the warmest clothes I had. In the evening, right around sunset I remember, it got colder than it was later during the night. But he had a second jacket he gave me. I don’t know how he wasn’t freezing in that old leather jacket he always wore. I guess he was used to spending a lot of time outdoors, hunting. That’s what he told me, too, you know? ‘I spend time out in the open, I hunt a lot.’ I bought it, he really looked the part.”  
  
“Maybe he gave you his warm jacket.”  
  
Adam’s hands stay in a perfect ten and two position while he gazes at the empty road, stretching straight right ahead, perfect visibility. He’s driven down here a few times but you’ve always got to keep your eyes on the road, you just never know. Surprises come at you when you least expect them. That’s why they’re called surprises. Some people love them. Adam is never sure.  
  
“Maybe he did,” he says slowly.  
  
He hasn’t been thinking of his own father at all, not since he met his half-brothers again, yet here he is, on the way to the place that equates his mother more than anything else, talking about John Winchester.  
  
He didn’t need a degree in Psychology to figure out back in the Cage that he and Michael had one major thing in common to facilitate their bond.  
  
“Did you think about him when he wasn’t around?” Michael asks.  
  
Adam casts him a glance, unsure if Michael’s been listening to his thoughts without giving Adam a sign.  
  
“Sometimes,” he answers truthfully. “I mean, I’d see a kid with his dad fixing his bike, or the two of them coming out of a diner together, you know? Or my mom would be doing the bills and I’d want something, or worse, I’d need it and I was old enough—Early on, I guess, I was already old enough to figure we didn’t have much money coming in, so I started picking up odd jobs when I was thirteen, fourteen. I didn’t mind, most of the time. I wanted to buy stuff, my own comics, a toy, that kind of thing. And I wanted to bring in some cash, even though she always made me keep it all, or spend it all on myself. We’d go to the mall together and she’d say, ‘All right, you are paying for your jacket, you can pick your jacket.’” Adam chuckles. “Thank God I never went for the crazy shit, jackets with skulls, or expensive brand-name stuff.”  
  
He looks at Michael again and finds he’s turned to him, bodily, in the passenger’s seat. “I’m sorry,” Adam tells him. “I guess I’m tripping down memory lane, we should’ve seen that coming.”  
  
“Keep talking,” Michael says in that low voice of his that makes Adam pinch himself to this day about the odds of this guy liking him, of all people.  
  
“What was I saying? Oh, yeah.” He remembers. “Thinking about John. No, I didn’t think about him much when he wasn’t around. Not in a way I would know. You know what they say about absentee fathers.” The words are out of his mouth and he might not be the fastest horse in the race but damn, he could try to think before he speaks.  
  
But Michael only asks, “What do they say about absentee fathers?”  
  
“That their children think of them without knowing they do it? Subconsciously, you know. It’s in here.” Adam points to his head. “Their absence affects us as much as their presence, I guess.”  
  
He had a lot of free time on his hands in the Cage, so he reached for the past, tried to break it down. It was a way of preventing a descent into madness. People went to therapy for the same reason, come to think of it. “I’ve had to work out a lot by myself but like I said – I had a lot of free time down there.”  
  
“Are you aware you do that sometimes?”  
  
“Work things out by myself?”  
  
“Refer to things you haven’t actually told me.”  
  
Adam frowns, then rolls his eyes, even though he’s feeling uneasy. “I don’t need to tell you anything. You and I are one person. You are in my head.”  
  
“You know it doesn’t work like that. I am in your head but we are not one person.” The way Michael says it makes a quick shiver run up and down Adam’s body. He looks at him, genuinely discombobulated. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean that I am me and you are you. You know you see me as someone entirely different from yourself even as you perceive these are your own features, your body.” Michael pauses. “You know you can touch me. Doesn’t it feel real to you?” If it wasn’t Michael, Adam would say he sounded almost anxious.  
  
“It does,” Adam replies slowly. The conversation has taken a sharp turn and he suddenly isn’t sure where exactly he is on the actual road, either.  
  
Instead of checking the GPS, he looks at Michael of the corner of his eye. “How does that work?”  
  
He’s never asked; he’s thought about it, notices it every time he touches Michael, but he’s never asked. Downstairs it didn’t seem important. Upstairs… He just hasn’t.  
  
“I can make inter-dimensional portals appear with a snap of my fingers,” Michael says, Adam would like to think not pityingly. “You think I can’t make myself feel material to you?”  
  
“Why do you do it?”  
  
Another salvo of words without thinking first. Michael’s face flies open in wonder and Adam privately gives himself a cheer – barely audible through the adrenaline rush in his ears.  
  
They drive in silence for so long that Adam decides Michael isn’t going to answer. It still feels good to have asked the question.  
  
“I don’t know,” Michael says. His eyes are back on the road, unblinking. “I don’t know.”  
  
***  
  
Twenty miles outside of Windom, Adam chickens out and turns the car around. Michael makes no comment, he just asks if Adam wants to stop by anywhere else. So they pick up some food and take a detour to Lake Freeborn where they sit on the hood of the car and talk about ten thousand little things.


	6. Chapter 6

There’s a girl that comes to the café a couple of times a week who might have a crush on Adam. He hasn’t been in circulation for a decade and he never had much experience to begin with so he can’t really be sure.  
  
He was scrolling through Twitter recently and found a quote that made him think. It was some Swiss or German psychologist who said that women found guys who were close to their fathers cool and those close to their mothers trustworthy. Since it’s every teenage boy’s dream to be trustworthy rather than cool, 17-year-old Adam would have cheered to no end.  
  
He wasn’t unpopular in high school, not per se, but he remembers this time when one of his mom’s co-workers tried to set him up with her daughter. Adam had overheard her telling his mom, when she thought they were out of earshot: “He is such a good-looking young man I don’t know why they’re not swarming around him in droves.”  
  
Adam thought the lady was just being nice to his mother and since there was no second date with the daughter he saw no reason to change his opinion. He never used to dwell on his looks, not obsessively, not in school or after. But lately, it’s been kind of a thing for him. Maybe it’s because there are mirrors in his life now. Funny how you can forget about them when you’re living slap bang amid the Fires of Eternal Damnation with the Devil for a neighbor.  
  
Mirrors are like some kind of magic objects at present – fewer things are more potent in conjuring up Michael so fast. It’s not like he isn’t there all the time anyway but they’ve both found ways to be around each other and stay virtually unnoticeable. It’s an art form you perfect when you have just the one person for company for years on end.  
  
So while he doesn’t exactly linger in front of them now, whenever Adam looks in a mirror for longer than a few seconds, he can feel Michael hovering. He never sees him there, which is mind-bending a little – he knows if Michael did show up in the mirror nothing would change because Adam _is_ Michael. But he’s also not and he feels Michael as a separate being in an acute way that’s different from any feeling he used to have in the Cage. After their aborted trip to Minnesota, Adam knows Michael is on the same page. They inhabit Adam’s world more and more as two separate beings and nowhere is that more palpable than when it’s just his face staring back at him.  
  
He doesn’t find it unpleasant at all. If anything, it’s… No, it’s not nice either. Nice is mellow, nice is humdrum. Adam doesn’t object to nice, salt of the earth and all that, it’s good stuff. He trusts nice. But with Michael there, like a breath caressing his nape while Adam checks himself out in the mirror, it’s anything but mellow. The sense is of hot water rivulets down your body after you’ve been out shoveling snow for half an hour.  
  
Michael doesn’t make any comments on Adam’s new relationship with mirrors. Neither does he make any comments on Adam’s looks; he never has. Adam has been working out and discovers his arms were not entirely like chicken wings to begin with but Michael says nothing about that either.  
  
Adam enjoys working out; it’s the same sensation as the mirror thing with nearby, but he’s too busy straining to think about it. The stretch of his body, the burn, the dampness building up in the groove of his ribcage – they are manifestations of his own physical being. They are not like a pair of magnificent wings but an idiotic, irreverent part of him thinks it doesn’t matter as long as it’s Michael’s turn to be looking at Adam now.  
  
***  
  
Tracey, that’s the name of the girl with the crush, shows up at his doorstep one Saturday while he is cooling down after forty minutes of sit-ups and push-ups. He sees it’s her through the side panel window and opens the door, brows knitting in surprise.  
  
Tracey has hair in five different shades of blond and pink and a smile that looks like it should be paid to be on a box of anti-anxiety herbal supplements. Despite her funky hair, she is unassuming, having struck up a rapport with Adam through an ongoing conversation about recipes for chocolate chip cookies. (His mom made the best chocolate chip cookies. The ones they have in the café are the closest to a runner-up Adam has ever tried.)  
  
“Hey,” Adam says, forgetting her name for a few disorienting seconds. “Hey Tracey.” He’s about to ask what she is doing there but stops himself when he realizes it sounds kind of accusatory. Tracey’s look up and down his body derails him further. “Um,” Adam says questioningly in the end.  
  
“Sorry, is this a bad time? I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to ask for your number at the café,” Tracey gestures vaguely over her shoulder, “but I wanted to ask—Sorry, I just…I knew you worked out.”  
  
“Um,” Adam repeats. “Yeah? Yeah, I do, I guess.”  
  
Her words about his phone number arrive to him with a few seconds delay and he tunes her out, staring at her and expecting black eyes or a flutter of wings or anything that has very little to do with his superman physique. “Michael,” he says in that parallel space in his head. “What is she? How did she find me? Is she a demon? Why is she here?”  
  
Michael moves to lean on the wall next to him – if he were visible, he’d still be out of Tracey’s line of sight, which comforts Adam irrationally. “Why is she here?” Michael repeats and his tone is amused, borderline patronizing. “I believe she is here because of you. She’s 100% human, Adam. And you did tell her where you live.”  
  
Adam breathes out and remembers. Of course he told her. They were talking about the oldest tree in the town and Adam told Tracey his bedroom windows looked over at it. ‘The blue porch? The house with all the navy details, is that you?’ Tracey had asked and Adam nodded. ‘Yeah!’  
  
“Probably shouldn’t have talked about your bedroom,” Michael says with exaggerated concern, “if you didn’t want her to stop by.” His lips are twitching. He really is something else; his humor, these glimpses into it make Adam baffled, and a little sorry, for Castiel and everyone up in Heaven who got Michael so wrong.  
  
Nothing is real, everything is about perception. Adam can’t look away from the tiny smirk on Michael’s mouth and is accosted yet again by the unfathomable experience of looking at his own face and seeing someone else entirely. It’s so mortifying to think of yourself as hot. It makes the errant skips his heart…well, even more errant.  
  
Meanwhile Tracey is finishing a sentence. “…thirty miles tops. What do you think?”  
  
“I think that sounds…” Adam gives her a tremulous smile and goggles at Michael. “What did she say?”  
  
“She asked if you want to go with her to a festival celebrating peanut butter. It’s in Iowa.” Michael speaks without any inflection. “Evidently, there will be cookies. Quite a trip for some cookies but knock yourself out.” He is such a dick sometimes.  
  
“Yeah, all right,” Adam tells Tracey in a rush. “Or no.” He flounders and resolutely doesn’t look at Michael. “I’ll need to check my schedule, I mean.”  
  
“Yeah, of course.” Tracey has dimples that remind Adam of Lilith. “You let me know.” Adam is wondering whether she gave him her number and he forgot that too, when Tracey steps closer.  
  
Their eyes meet.  
  
“Can I come in and use your bathroom?” she speaks under her breath.  
  
Adam steps aside automatically and Tracey walks past him giving him a smile; it’s quite something, that smile, two short stories and the start of a novel right there, and she’s still not looking away.  
  
“Where is it?” she asks.  
  
“Right there to the left at the…back,” Adam finishes, the last word barely audible – Tracey’s already gone, her pony tail swishing merrily behind her.  
  
“Do you want me to…” Michael’s voice startles him and Adam turns to see him make a gesture with his right hand. Adam fails to interpret it, even though it looks simple.  
  
“Oh.” It _is_ simple. It means a wall. A deliberate wall, not like the one that’s been shimmering in place ever since they left Lebanon.  
  
“I don’t think you’ll need to,” Adam tells him, “do you?”  
  
“I am not familiar with the nuances of human…courtship.” Michael nods towards the depth of the house. “But she is inside our house, isn’t she?”  
  
Adam could tell him she may also be leaving in a minute. Adam could tell him he hasn’t had sex in so long a freakout about whether they’ve changed it during his absence is not out of the question. He could tell Michael that Tracey is really cute and just thinking about her walking past so close to him makes his stomach tense up. But he is so stuck on the little detail of Michael calling the house ‘ours’ it’s like the infamous David and Goliath tale – he says nothing, for the longest time.  
  
Michael’s lips quirk and it’s nothing like Tracey’s, or anyone else’s smile, ever. It’s cleaving right down the middle of what millennia of evolution have taught Adam about body language and he is left blind: is this the end of something or is it the beginning?  
  
“Your friend is coming back,” Michael says. “I’ll leave you to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Twitter quote Adam has remembered is inaccurate but the personal zest for him remains. The author is Bert Hellinger, the book - Love's Own Truths.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone who doesn't want to go into this chapter without knowing what it includes, go to the notes at the end.

Kissing hasn’t been changed in his absence, Adam discovers with Tracey’s help, and neither does he like it any less than he used to. He lets her shift them until his back is pressed against the wall and falls into a well of sensations that scrape off all other brain functions for a long minute.  
  
Tracey’s body, when he begins exploring, seems so unfamiliar at first, it’s as if he’s only seen a woman’s body in pictures before. His hands however, quite of their own volition, know what they are doing – soon enough, Tracey’s chest rises high and urgent and her lips are damp against his throat. Then she is toeing off her shoes, nodding vaguely over her shoulder: _That way, right?  
  
_She needs the bedroom. The bedroom the talk of which is responsible for these developments if you ask Michael. Adam didn’t but Michael had something to say nonetheless.  
  
Distracted, Adam wills himself to switch off – he finds Tracey’s mouth, finds her breasts, finds the buttons of her jeans. Instinct guides him and desire does the rest; soon enough Tracey is writhing in a way that makes his body whine in sympathy.  
  
She clamps around him fast enough, a long, honeyed entrapment. He thinks of telling her his hand is going numb when her legs fall open and she lets out a soundless laugh, pink high on her cheekbones like it’s striving upward to add its most attractive shade to her hair.  
  
She catches her breath, eyes not timid as they travel up his body to meet his. Adam himself feels like he is seventeen again, in that no man’s land between doing and simply being, while Kathy Moss is grinning up at him, her high-pitched moans still echoing in his ears. _Girls like sex_ , he had thought back then, dumbfounded at the discovery. He had simply wanted to make Kathy feel good, going at it blind. It worked out; here, too. He is sharing the experience with someone and in a flash, he understands something he already knows to his very bone: sharing matters more than anything.  
  
Tracey seems to value it pretty highly too because a moment later Adam is staring at the ceiling, fingers skittering over her shoulders that are retreating down his body. She must really like him; she is already nosing at places that ache and beg, and soon enough arousal is like sweet pain. He is afraid to blink, eyes riveted up, a helpless body on a pleasure raft.  
  
He thinks of people putting mirrors on their bedroom ceilings and suddenly, it’s all he can think about. _Watch, watch, watch!_ his mind cants until there _is_ a mirror up there, he can see it as plain as day, Michael staring down back at him, eyes stunned and unblinking. A choked moan breaks out from Adam as his hips rise from the mattress, galvanized.  
  
Tracey’s mouth is a reminder of a simple life with simple pursuits. His life now, Adam’s hazy brain supplies, is not complicated either, but as he pants and bites his mouth, eyes locked with Michael’s, nothing is simple at all. _This is what we do_ , he gasps in his head. He needs Michael to know, it’s a visceral need to grab a chisel and etch it into Michael’s divine head. _This is what humans do and this is how I am when it happens. Watch me.  
  
_His fingers gather covers into his palms and his fists clutch onto them. Adam groans and cries out, shaking under Michael’s blazing eyes, not a drop of inhibition left.  
  
***  
  
Tracey leaves with a mischievous look in her eyes, tying up her hair in a messy bun as she’s walking out. Adam is relieved and a little disappointed that she doesn’t kiss him on parting. It leaves him strangely unmoored about the events of the very recent past and the very near future, about the current status quo, about what is expected of him.  
  
He closes the door behind her and stays where he is, head bowed, eyes mindlessly going left to right and back over the line where door meets floor. His body is suffering from a special languid kind of fatigue and he is grateful he’s got nothing to do today, nothing at all. It’s ridiculous to be focusing on that right now but he is only human.  
  
“Michael?” he says into the quiet without turning.  
  
Michael doesn’t indicate his presence in any tangible way and Adam can’t sense him either. It’s not unusual to have radio silence. Adam goes to the bathroom and he has showers, to name the few instances when there’s no trace of Michael to be found. He heaves a little sigh and pivots, taking in the hallway where the faintest scent of a woman still lingers.  
  
“Michael,” he repeats, a plea this time.  
  
His Archangel has checked out for an undetermined amount of time. Adam would like to believe that Michael would say something if he left for good one day. There’s no certainty in these things. They have never talked about it. No matter the evolution of their relationship, no matter their closeness, a little part of Adam never forgets that Michael is God’s favorite son, His favorite warrior, the former Ruler of Heaven. The one who slays dragons, ask anyone on the street – Saint Michael the Archangel is not the one people pray to with requests. You don’t cajole someone like that for petty little reassurances.  
  
You don’t invite them to watch you having sex either, so it turns out that little part of Adam did forget, or maybe it didn’t but he simply didn’t care – he’s accepted Michael for all that he is and his whole being strived for him just then. Adam isn’t sure if _invite_ is even the word. Beg, more like it; demand; besiege. He is mortified he subjected Michael to his wanton outburst but he can’t turn back the clock.  
  
Even if he could, he doesn’t think self-restraint would have been possible. It sprung up from deep inside of him, this desire, this need, erupting like a geyser and Adam was elevated to staggering heights with it, feeling like he only needed to reach and he’d touch Michael’s face in that phantom mirror on the ceiling.  
  
The mirror seemed real. Adam can’t just make things appear. Michael did this, put it up there. Michael was close enough to hear what had started as a whisper in Adam’s head.  
  
“Michael, come on,” Adam says, hands opening in helplessness.  
  
He walks back to the bedroom, his bare feet making little slapping sounds with each step he takes. The bed is predictably a wrinkled mess but not more so than if Adam had spent the morning there having snacks and watching television, shifting around every hour. What restless things bodies are.  
  
He slowly lifts his eyes to the space on the ceiling right above the bed. It’s the dusty color of white that was painted a long time ago. Nothing more, nothing less. A blank canvas you could put anything on and Adam put a mirror there.  
  
“I did,” Michael says behind him.  
  
Adam turns sharply. Michael is leaning by the door. He is the spitting image of Adam from earlier, when he opened the door to Tracey, and Adam wonders whether Michael is aware of it. Adam has never seen him appear differently from how Adam himself looks at the moment. But at the moment, Adam is wearing boxer shorts and the clean t-shirt he pulled out of the closet after he was done using his old one to clean himself up.  
  
“Look, I’m sorry,” Adam says quickly, sincerely. “I don’t even know what happened, Michael. I was out of my head.” He shrugs with a twist to his lips that insists on turning into an embarrassed smile. He withdraws it hastily and pulls a grimace instead. “Yeah…Sorry.”  
  
“Sorry?” Michael steps into the room, eyebrows knitting. “That’s all you have to say?”  
  
Adam opens and closes his mouth like a startled fish. “I…I don’t know what else to say. I really am sorry.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because I made you watch me do…that. Or have it, whatever. It wasn’t—You didn’t ask for it and I—”  
  
“You made me?”  
  
It’s Adam’s turn to frown. “Yeah. I mean I was calling for you and…Don’t make me say it, all right?” His one-man breathless chorus of _watch, watch, watch_ echoes in his head and makes his heart speed up.  
  
Michael stalks the room, head tilted, eyes lingering on the bed, on the hamper where Adam put the soiled t-shirt. He walks around in silence for a minute before stopping in front of Adam, facing him squarely. Adam can feel the pulse in his throat. He is sure it’s beating so harsh it’s visible from the outside.  
  
“You can’t make me do anything,” Michael tells him, imperious without even trying. “Not in the way you mean it. You can ask me and I can do it but you can’t make me.”  
  
“So you…?” Adam swallows, the question refusing to form.  
  
Michael is waiting for him, a little pointedly, then he leans in, speaks close to Adam’s ear. “No one can make me do anything.”  
  
Adam swallows again and nods when Michael pulls away to meet his eye. White noise has taken over his brain and he has literally never been so empty of words. His gaze stays locked with Michael’s without any effort, however, as if all communication energy has transferred into body language.  
  
Michael seems a little off, Adam slowly realizes as he keeps taking him in. He is regal and beautiful beyond words, that’s par for the course, but there’s an air of distance about him that is dimly familiar. He can’t quite put his finger on it and Michael doesn’t let him, either – he moves, heading out of the bedroom.  
  
Adam follows him on autopilot and watches Michael settle at the kitchen table, body relaxing into the chair, hands folded loosely in his lap. He eyes Adam inquiringly. “Aren’t you going to make your eggs?”  
  
Adam is taken aback before he rewinds – his workout. “Yeah,” he replies and makes a beeline for the fridge. He is actually very hungry. “Yeah. I’m going to make some now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short Adam/Tracey at the start of the chapter, not graphic.


	8. Chapter 8

Hard as it is for Adam to believe, their days continue to unfold as if nothing had happened. Michael still goes along with whatever, rarely making suggestions; he has been and continues to be mildly interested in the minutiae of human existence. Adam has never seen him engrossed in anything humans do, with one notable exception that makes his ears burn.  
  
Apart from a two-hour drive to a deer sanctuary four days after the Tracey thing, their life stays as uneventful as it comes. They continue to go out to eat or cook, they watch TV shows and movies, they read blogs and articles. Michael has been quite taken with history and more often than not, when left to his own devices, he is popping in and out of thin air, visiting museums and other places of interest around the world. Currently, he’s on the wars in Europe in the Middle Ages; Adam finds a lot of his commentary engaging but it doesn’t stick with him – he enjoys the brief spike of excitement when he learns something curious and he really enjoys listening to Michael’s voice, his rhythm and his breathing. Adam chalks it up to the Cage – Michael’s voice is practically the equivalent of a security blanket now. He no longer believes that’s all there is to it but things being what they are between them, he doesn’t want to dwell.  
  
Adam still goes to work, though that experience has changed a little, because now he goes on high alert each time a female customer walks into the café. He and Tracey didn’t text or talk for a few days, then she sent him a message asking if he could join her for the peanut butter event after all. He texted back, ‘Sorry, I’m working that day.’ He didn’t even say, ‘Rain check.’ Neither did he tell her his co-worker had asked if he could take her shift that very day and he’d jumped at the opportunity like a cat on a ball of string.  
  
It’s not that he doesn’t like Tracey. She seems pretty great. It’s that he doesn’t think this is about Tracey at all; to know that and to keep it going would be no good for anyone.  
  
He doesn’t think he’s had a serious conversation about romantic feelings once in his entire life. His mom telling him to make a Valentine’s paper heart for a girl in his class in first grade was as close as it got. He misses his mother and he will regret the way he lost her until the day he dies. But in this instance, Adam finds himself guilty of being glad she’s up there in peace in Heaven. He can’t help but cringe when he imagines how a talk with her would go.  
  
‘Mom, I have feelings for the archangel Michael. Remember him? The most powerful one? The one who led God’s army and killed the Devil? Yeah, him. But it’s okay because he’s been possessing me for, like, an eternity. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well.’  
  
‘Are you out of your mind?’  
  
His mom rarely ever lost it with him – in all fairness, he didn’t give her reasons to, he was a good son – but when he pissed her off with something unbelievably stupid she’d goggle at him, furious, and say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ There was that one time when he was fifteen, he’d agreed to smuggle out a stash of nickel bags in his backpack. The cops were outside school and this guy, Ryan Thousend was his name, shoved Adam into the bathroom, then proceeded with the shoving – this time it was a plastic bag into Adam’s hands. Ryan told him to walk out as usual and head home. ‘Don’t look at them, don’t fucking make eye contact, they won’t even see you. I’ll make it up to you.’  
  
Adam never thought his mom would ever borrow turns of phrase from the school’s self-appointed narc boss but you learn something new every day. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ she had nearly shouted. Adam doesn’t even remember how he’d ended up telling her; maybe it was because a day or two later Ryan hadn’t shown his face or reached out in any way and mothers can see when their sons are all twisted up inside, no matter how cool said sons play it. In the end, after a lot of arguments and yelling, his mom had taken his backpack to Ryan Thousend’s house, rang the bell, handed over the bag to Ray’s father and told him to fix this. Adam would meet Ryan in the school corridors for years to come and Ryan never stopped giving him the stink eye but he didn’t touch him either so that was a win.  
  
He is about one hundred percent positive this new situation with Michael would earn him an, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ commentary from his mom. The worst part is, he thinks he would deserve it.  
  
***  
  
“People seem to place great value on romantic relationships in the present day,” Michael says one day out of the blue and Adam drops the potato peeler in the sink where it makes a viciously loud clattering sound.  
  
He turns to look at Michael, who is sprawling in the chair and looking back at him with an expression Adam doesn’t dare investigate for too long. “In the present day?” he repeats, retrieving the calamitous utensil from the sink and returning to his potatoes.  
  
“Yeah. It seems throughout history, most humans saw marriage as a union of some economic importance. People married for money, social advancement. Chose partners who’d help them with field work, running the house...”  
  
Adam gives that some thought. “Sounds pretty cynical to me,” he offers.  
  
Behind him, Michael takes his time. “You believe in love,” he says eventually. He makes it a statement but Adam knows better.  
  
He finishes the potato, washes his hands and turns, wiping them into a towel. “Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t have much experience exactly and we haven’t even been back up here long enough.” His mouth gives an outlet to his bitterness with a quirk. “And as far as parents go, John Winchester and Kate Milligan were hardly the greatest love story of all time.”  
  
“They had you.” Michael is giving him that look again but this time Adam reaches for it in his mind’s eye, grabs it and turns it over and over, like a Rubik’s cube needing to be put together. All the colors are a mess, though, and Adam’s body tingles as if someone’s raking their nails over the most tender parts of his skin.  
  
He blows out a surreptitious breath and shrugs. “Wonder of wonders. Met, hooked up, got pregnant, here I am.” Surprisingly, with Michael’s gaze on him, it hurts less than he must have been afraid it would. He’s never said it out loud until now after all.  
  
“Here you are,” Michael echoes, voice low.  
  
They look at each other without talking as seconds tick by and Adam falls into it, weightless and care-free, absolved of thought like he imagines birds and animals are – just living and being, pure and simple.  
  
“Why are you asking me about any of this?” he hears himself speak and it seems to break the spell because Michael looks down to his lap. “It was something I read, about royalty. I was just curious about how the concept of this kind of union between two people changed over time. How the concept of love did.”  
  
“If only one of us was as old as time to have been there and tell us.” Adam smiles and ducks his head to catch Michael’s gaze. He is successful but Michael doesn’t smile back. “I don’t remember any of it.” _I didn’t care about your kind_ , Adam hears. “Even if I did, even if I had come down to Earth to walk among humans – how would I have been able to tell? What do I know?”  
  
“Right.” It’s lame but it’s all Adam has got. Well, he’s got a lot more, but he feels like he’s standing at the foot of a mountain, the Himalayas, the way he’s seen it on TV and climbing is totally out of the question. Training, equipment, a goddamn guide would not go amiss but it’s just Adam standing there. “I’m human but what do I know, either?” he tells Michael, soft.  
  
“You don’t know love?”  
  
“No, I guess I don’t think I do.”  
  
Outside, a woman shouts, “Rocky, come back here!” over the sound of ferocious barking that outlasts her call long and sure. The world is plunged back into a more ringing silence after that.  
  
“Is Tracey coming back?” Michael asks. He’s holding eye contact, it’s calm, so calm. Adam can’t do it this time and turns, starts the tap running over the potatoes in the pot. It strikes him that they should look kind of pretty without their skin.  
  
“She’s not. I mean, we’re not…I’m not going to see her again.” He is prepared for an explanation, for something more to be demanded of him but when he throws Michael a look over his shoulder, Michael doesn’t seem on the verge of speaking at all. He is pretty busy staring right ahead with intensity the fridge hardly merits. “It wasn’t going to work out,” Adam volunteers. His knuckles are turning red, he dimly registers, yanks them out from under the scalding hot water.  
  
“Why not?” Michael asks.  
  
“Didn’t like her enough, I guess. Can’t make it happen, it’s either there or it isn’t.” Adam takes the pot to the stove, turns it on and puts his hands on his hips, squinting through the window.  
  
Michael appears right behind him, a warm, physical presence with an obscenely loud, moist breath against Adam’s nape as he speaks. “But how can you be sure? How do you know if it's there or it isn’t?”  
  
Adam swallows hard and turns, so they’re practically nose to nose. “You just do. In your gut.”  
  
Michael’s hand on his solar plexus nearly makes him jump. “Here?”  
  
Adam feels his heart hammer against Michael’s hand, revealing everything, every answer Michael could possibly need, every question Adam didn’t even know he had about himself. His own face, so close, should be a revelation too but it isn’t. It’s another’s face and that other seems to be mystified; he seems to be something else as well because he’s not moving his hand away from Adam’s stomach.  
  
Through a fog, Adam lifts his own hand and places it over Michael’s. “Yeah, here.” He can feel his heartbeat against his own hand. Technically, both hands are his.  
  
Technically, the heart is Michael’s too.  
  
“Potatoes need at least thirty minutes,” Adam says, stepping to the side as his hand skimmers down over Michael’s. “I’m going out to rake the lawn.”


	9. Chapter 9

In the Cage, conversation about family would creep in at uneven intervals. It was like having a drink but people drank in different moods and with different purpose.  
  
Sometimes, it was like good beer. Adam would regale Michael with his childhood stories but perhaps his listener did not mind so much. The room would shift into an illusion: a crisp winter morning, or a lilac evening on a porch, or the kitchen in the Milligan home, warmly lit and smelling of roast chicken. That was something else too – the air would shift, turning fragrant. It could have been the scent of honeysuckle, a misty forest, an incense that was intoxicating and unfamiliar - or so Adam thought.  
  
“How do you do these?” he asked Michael once as he lay on his childhood bed, the laundry detergent his mom used to wash his clothes and sheets faint in his nostrils. “The smells, the visions. How do you do them?”  
  
“I have your memories,” Michael told him. “It’s all coming from you. I don’t know Earth, I don’t know human existence. I know Heaven.”  
  
“Oh. Right. Of course.” Adam paused, for a long while, formulating the question he had actually meant to ask all along. “But how do you choose? It’s like a Hollywood production, a TV show or something, and you’re the set manager.”  
  
Behind his closed eyes, Michael looked taken aback. “I just know.”  
  
Another time and another question.  
  
“Michael, you have access to my memories. You can recreate so much. Isn’t it easier to just reach in there and see for yourself?”  
  
“See what for myself?” Michael had seemed bewildered, a little on guard.  
  
“Well…everything.” Adam had to smile to cover his embarrassment. “I’m talking your ear off sometimes. Why do you let me? You can just look in, that’s what I mean.”  
  
Michael’s expression left no doubt he’d never given this any consideration. It was the first time Adam had seen something so child-like flit over his features, his heart tripped in how fast it had gone to Michael. “I guess I’m bored and like listening to you,” was the reply Adam had gotten and it was good enough for him. It sounded like the truth and it made him value his own words more, share with even more candor.  
  
Other times talk of family came out like cheap whiskey whose purpose was to make you sick to the stomach, cleanse you, knock you out. Ghouls came up; Lucifer falling came up.  
  
Then there were the times when it was like wine, copious amounts of it, that gradually made you feel like you were running your fingers over a soft but tightly tangled ball of yarn.  
  
Adam would talk about John Winchester or his brothers then. Michael would talk about helping his Father lock up his own sister. Their fingers would meet on that ball, each seeking one thread, something to follow smoothly, easily, no knots. They’d spin their tales, turning maudlin and meditative, Adam sinking into sleep with the feeling that there was not one straight answer out there in the world but that was somehow all right – that was being alive.  
  
He was being alive and he had an archangel watching over him, and perhaps, a little, Adam was watching over him, too.  
  
***  
  
Turns out, Michael and Adam go on what could conceivably be called a holiday. Adam tends to decline Michael’s offer for Earth-hopping and Michael doesn’t offer that much anyway. It’s an unspoken agreement that works for both of them. Adam’s guess is they each need ways to feel one hundred percent human and archangel, respectively.  
  
But he is not a dumbass. Access to instant teleportation to any place on the planet, all expenses paid, puts Adam in an exclusive club of, like, five in the entire world. If not one – he has some authority on angels and he is pretty sure those who are working on the ground are busy doing their duty rather than zipping their vessels around to visit idyllic beaches.  
  
Michael, however, did. Adam was watching some show on TV where a couple was shopping for a goddamn island and he muttered, “Wow, man, look at that.”  
  
Next thing, he was actually looking at that.  
  
He and Michael have a little chat about warnings first but Adam catches his reflection in a mother of pearl mirror on the wall – his glowing eyes and gleaming teeth suggest that if he wants to be taken seriously he should work on his stern delivery. He goes around the house, gawking in appreciation, while Michael leans on various pillars and walls, watching him with his arms comfortably crossed over his chest, his expression failing to deliver on his own ‘stern worrier’ front.  
  
“Where exactly are we?” Adam asks. He looks like he is walking on water; the house, or actually the hut, has glass floors and glassless windows. The air smells of exotic blossoms and oils and the sea stretches as far as the eye can see, like an expanse of finest turquoise silk.  
  
“I’m not telling you,” Michael says. The brilliant sunlight makes it impossible to hide the playfulness on his face and Adam wishes for different flooring beneath his feet. Wood or concrete would help.  
  
“You’re not telling me,” he says.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“For fun.”  
  
Adam moves closer to Michael, who’s standing by the dining table and turning half a ripe papaya fruit in his hand. He seems to be studying it. The rich shades of orange make his eye color pop out to rival the skies and the seas.  
  
“I didn’t know you did things for fun,” Adam teases.  
  
Without lifting his head, Michael smiles at the papaya. “Not things like this, no.”  
  
“Let me guess.” Adam lowers himself into a chair and picks up a piece of kiwi from the tray of fresh fruit. “Waking up angels at four in the morning to make entire garrisons march in complicated formations?”  
  
Michael pins him down under his gaze and narrows his eyes. Adam’s face splits into a huge smile he takes advantage of to shove the kiwi into his mouth. He adds a few more pieces to keep it company then bites into a mango. When he looks up again, Michael is still standing, eyes unwavering on Adam’s face. Adam is grateful his mouth is so full of juices that he can gulp without looking like a fifteen-year-old trying to speak to his first crush.  
  
But then Michael reaches for his chin and Adam stops chewing, a ridiculous thought whooshing through his mind – he is about to be kissed while his mouth is full of mashed fruit.  
  
There’s a light brush along his lower lip and down his chin, then Michael wipes his thumb on one of the linen napkins next to the fruit tray.  
  
Adam hastily swallows. “Shall we go look around? I promise I won’t look for clues about our location.”  
  
There seems to be one big building in the center of the resort, if resort is even the right word. It’s a few huts, five or six, situated at a respectable distance from each other, all joined to the central building by long bridges. Its style is the same as the others, a hut made of natural materials rather than brick and mortar. It’s much bigger however and there seems to be a mezzanine level. Some of the windows are covered with gauze-like curtains – Adam figures there must be spa treatments in progress.  
  
On cue his shoulders announce their stiffness with a loud bang. It’s incredible how much pain and discomfort people can get used to living with, as though pain and discomfort are an irrefutable part of existence. Accommodating them shouldn’t be that easy yet here Adam is, his body suddenly groaning with soreness just at the mental image of deft hands working his muscles.  
  
“Maybe we could get a massage,” he murmurs hopefully as his eyes slide to the next room – an open space with a yoga class in progress.  
  
Michael doesn’t reply. Adam’s eyes fall on a woman in the group.  
  
He is slammed into the passenger seat while Michael’s entire celestial being reorganizes its existential DNA into the strongest, fiercest composition possible.  
  
The woman locks eyes with Michael. Every single person around them freezes.  
  
Shocked, Adam strains to take a better look at her but it’s like looking at someone through the wrong end of binoculars. He never feels even remotely in charge when Michael has full possession but this is different. Adam is banished, sent away so deep and so far, the very concepts lose their meaning.  
  
Adam closes his eyes and stills, completely, letting himself turn into a speck of dust on the floor of the grandest cathedral. He may not be Michael’s true vessel but he is John Winchester’s son – he is a sword for Michael, his to wield and to own when Michael needs him. It was not written in the stars but it became his destiny.  
  
“Hello, nephew.” The Darkness has a gorgeous voice.  
  
“Amara.”  
  
“No ‘auntie’?” Pause. “I suppose we were never that close.” Amused.  
  
What Michael is feeling Adam can’t tell. He’s never been so out of reach. It’s a struggle to remember that he, himself, even exists as a separate entity.  
  
“You don’t need to hide your vessel, you know,” Amara says. “I see him right in there anyway. I’m not here to hurt anyone.”  
  
Seconds tick by and images rush in as if the static screen on a TV has transformed into an HD picture. Adam only has the time to note that Amara’s just as he would have imagined her if he’d given it any thought, when Michael speaks. “Then why are you here?”  
  
Michael is afraid, Adam is now aware enough to feel that now. Or at least more afraid than he has ever been before. The memory of what he helped do to Amara casts a very long shadow all the way to the very recent memory of helping with God’s own imprisonment.  
  
“I am here to talk.” Amara stands in front of Michael, head held high, her eyes those of a woman who knows herself as no one else ever will. “I know what you did. But the Winchesters failed to trap my brother. I didn’t want to interfere. I’ve moved on.” Amara adds the last as if she is doing Michael the personal courtesy to inform him. “But He is powerful again. I’m not sure what that means; he’s become very…unpredictable.” A subtle eye roll but so imbued with attitude, it jars Michael like a knife leaving a gash.  
  
“I don’t care. Like you, I don’t want to be involved. He betrayed me.” Michael is lightning, trembling, making his aunt listen to him with utmost attention. “He betrayed my brothers, even Lucifer. We fought for Him, we waited. We believed in Him. Now I’ve come back up to find no paradise but a desolate place. Humans are overcome with regret and anguish. Monsters roam the earth at His will. Heaven is broken.” Michael’s voice rasps on the last word and he clamps his mouth shut, titling his chin higher than Amara’s.  
  
Her eyebrow arches slowly. “You have become more cynical than Lucifer, nephew.”  
  
“Imprisonment will do that to you.”  
  
“I know,” Amara says with emphasis and smiles without much warmth. It’s radiant all the same. “Let me guess. Family disappointed you, too.” When Michael doesn’t say anything in reply, Amara moves, walking around him to the open doors behind. She stands with her back to them. Somehow, the sun is coming down – in the back of Adam’s mind, he recalls it was high in the sky what seems like five minutes ago.  
  
“I would have never wanted to leave here,” Amara says quietly. “I could see His vision and I loved it, for its beauty and its flaws. I could see the pain, the fall of humanity but I knew He would be there to offer hope. I needed Him just as He needed me. I saw this world as He envisaged it…” She trails off and Adam gasps as darkness engulfs him but he sees through it, sees Michael for the first time since they left Lebanon. The wall is gone and Adam understands how Michael knows to call a place ‘desolate’.  
  
To say that Michael is lost would be to call Pompeii singed. Adam surges to him, reaches for him with all his might—

His own hands are clasping over Michael’s shoulders and it’s hard to say which one of them is more astonished as they stare into each other’s eyes. ‘How did you do that?’ Michael speaks into his mind but it’s Amara’s voice, a poet’s voice, that answers. “He took control because you are weak.”  
  
‘He is not weak,’ Adam would say but his survival instincts, contrary to what his life resume might suggest, are excellent.  
  
Michael stalks the room, eyes not leaving Amara. “I am weak because you weakened me, with your sentimental interludes. You know my Father’s betrayal has left me vulnerable. What do you want from me? An ally? Or have you come to execute your revenge?”  
  
Amara is already shaking her head and there is sincere sadness on her face as she intercepts Michael. “I don’t want to fight with you, nephew. You and I are family. I just wanted to stop by and tell you that,” she reaches suddenly and touches Michael’s hand, “the past is the past.”  
  
The touch is chilling but electric, knocking Adam down into near unconsciousness and leaving him as powerless as if he were an ant attempting to lift an elephant. “I’m sorry, Adam.” Amara sighs while Michael’s grace engulfs him.  
  
“I understand what you are doing better than you know,” Amara says. “I know what it’s like to feel this kind of attachment.” She looks down and to the side as if the sea behind her is whispering her secrets, her memories. “I was very fond of Dean. Come to think of it,” the arched eyebrow is back but the momentary softness is gone, “Lucifer was obsessed with the other brother, I found out. Maybe it’s a Winchester thing.” Her gaze flickers between Michael’s eyes and she lifts her hands. “I don’t mean to pry.”  
  
“Then don’t.”  
  
“All right.” She walks around him, holding his gaze, then moves back to her yoga matt. “I’ll finish the class and I’ll be on my way.” She assumes the pose everyone else is frozen in – standing on one leg and leaning all the way forward with their palms pressed together in front of their chests. Her balance is pretty impressive, Adam has to admit, even if he knows nothing about yoga. “You know how to find me,” Amara says and waits.  
  
“I do,” Michael speaks eventually, impassive, but he gives her a tiny nod.  
  
She closes her eyes and the room comes to life with nearly everyone swaying on their feet and reaching blindly to find purchase onto the nearest person. 


	10. Chapter 10

Adam has been lounging in a chair for a couple of hours gazing at the palette of colors changing before his eyes as the sun sets over the island. The clarity of the air makes the reds and the purples more vivid and the water gives them a glimmer. It is the kind of beauty that makes poets rejoice; humanity has looked at sunsets like this for millennia and, overwhelmed, sought a divine hand behind it: a Craftsman, a Creator.  
  
‘It’s just us,’ Adam thinks. ‘The sunset is nothing without us. It’s not beautiful or amazing or anything; it’s just water and air and light. We call it amazing, we see it as beautiful.’ He looks at Michael. “Know what I mean?” he asks out loud, the tendrils of Michael’s mind palpable in his own.  
  
Michael is staring ahead into nothingness like he’s been doing throughout dinner, throughout the entire time they’ve been outside. Since they met Amara. Not a twitch on his face, and Adam’s eyes return to the darkness of the sky.  
  
There is an abundance of stars. His unease is like one of them, flickering and distant but visible with the naked eye.  
  
The Cage was not a chitchat fest. Adam can wait. He knows how to.  
  
“You mean humans are His greatest creation,” Michael speaks, solemn and quiet. “The ones that give the rest its meaning.”  
  
Adam twists in his chair to face him, his body protesting that he’s delayed it for too long. “Well, I was never great in Philosophy but is there any at all? Meaning? Things are there, some are alive, some aren’t. What’s their meaning? They just…exist.” He has finally caught Michael’s eye and he offers him a weary smile. “We are just here. That’s all there is to it.”  
  
Michael seems to be studying him. The illusion that the soft light coming from the hut behind makes Adam more exposed is complete with the way Michael’s gaze moves from between his eyes down to his mouth than back up his eyes. Adam’s lips stretch further and he opens his hands in his lap.  
  
“Spoken like a true Unbeliever,” Michael says.  
  
Adam widens his eyes in pretend fear and his hands rise, like claws. “Are you going to rain your wrath down upon me?” He ducks his head to recapture Michael’s gaze. “You know I’m kidding, right? Maybe I shouldn’t. I just… I hate seeing you like that.”  
  
Michael bows his head, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “And I hate that you saw me like that.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Adam hesitates, doesn’t know if he can trust words to convey his meaning. So he lies back down and closes his eyes for a minute, opening his mind to let Michael see for himself how stumped Adam was at the discovery that Michael could keep so much anguish hidden from him for so long. To see his concern, his sympathy and his fierce conviction that it changes nothing about Michael, nothing of substance. Nothing at all.  
  
He lets Michael see that Adam understands.  
  
“You understand?”

Adam would be lying if he pretended to find Michael’s incredulous condescension surprising but he still turns his head, opens his eyes.  
  
“I do, yeah. How do you think we feel half the time? From the moment we’re born, there’s all of that: confusion, helplessness. Have you seen a baby? Don’t get me started on being a teenager. You’re, like, emo and miserable, and you don’t even know why. Then you’re shooting for the stars just cause you got new sneakers or something.” Adam shifts up, getting animated. “Everyone expects stuff from you. ‘Go tidy your room. You gotta study. You gotta figure out what you want to do with your life, young man!’ The pressure is fucking nuts but you also kind of feel like you’re going to live forever. Then one day you’re possessed by an Archangel and end up in Hell.” Adam scoffs. “Or you get a job with half-decent health insurance.”  
  
Michael is frowning at him as if Adam is confounding and a little crazy both. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing seems to coalesce. Adam raises his eyebrows, expectant.  
  
“All I mean is,” he says when it becomes clear Michael isn’t going to speak, “I get it better than you think.” His heart grows heavy and he reaches for Michael’s shoulder, the distance between their chairs immediately disappearing. “I know it’s not the same. But maybe it helps to know it’s not completely different. That others may have gone through a similar thing, in our own way. Humans are a mess, dude.”  
  
Michael doesn’t shift under his touch, nor does he show any signs that Adam’s words have found arid land in him, given it precious water. But Adam feels the change all the same, the way a moonless night transforms into a merely cloudy one. He calls it a win at this point.  
  
He lets his hand drop from Michael’s shoulder and he crosses his fingers in his lap, closes his eyes to rest them. He feels a strange sense of peace, as if each moment exists in complete isolation from the preceding and the following one. The light breeze feels wonderful on his skin and its play with the water calls Adam to listen to their whispers.  
  
Michael speaks and Adam grins at his words without opening his eyes.  
  
“If you call me ‘dude’ one more time I’m going back to calling you ‘kid.’”  
  
***  
  
Morning comes and then another, brilliant daylight a powerful antidote to angst and fear, as always. Adam swims and sunbathes, books a massage and jokes with Michael every opportunity he gets. Michael comes out of his shell in tiny increments, the way a wave laps at the shore – before you’ve seen it it’s retreating again but the sand is dark, wet in its wake, and you’ve got proof life is ever-changing. Nothing stays still.  
  
Adam isn’t stupid enough to believe the dog days are over and besides, there is no wall between him and Michael anymore. He sees it, the chasm God has left at the very heart of Michael’s being. You don’t fill a crater like that with meaning over one spa weekend.  
  
He isn’t sure what he would find in the middle of his own self either. He can hardly be called the poster boy of purpose. Perhaps the biggest difference between him and Michael is that Adam accepts time as necessity. He can shuffle his feet through his life, one day at a time, content to be alive and topside, content to have Michael with him, well enough if not perfect. Time will tell the rest.  
  
***  
  
He goes to his massage appointment after a nice nap, body already languid from sleep and mind still hazy. Michael trails behind him, silent, and Adam doesn’t even think of asking him why. Maybe other people need this kind of resort to escape human society but Adam’s social isolation is not a secret to him so Michael being glued to him like a stamp to an envelope – or the other way round – is very welcome.  
  
Until it’s not at all, because his massage turns out to be a pretty sensual treatment and Adam shares it with Michael without any thought: the tingling relief of supple muscles, the goose bumps, the unmitigated pleasure of being touched. In the deep recess of Adam’s mind, guilt engages in a whirlwind duel with a voice that whispers ‘touch starved,’ while Michael breathes over him, loudly, reverberating with every sensation of Adam’s body.  
  
In the ensuing chaos, Adam gets a boner.  
  
His first reaction is complete and utter mortification for subjecting the massage therapist to it. It translates to staying on his front on the bed, petrified, as seconds tick by. That ends up being a good call – the only thing worse in this situation would be to leap off the bed. Sheets flying out, Adam on his feet, his erection standing up with him like a finger pointing up to his absurd self.  
  
He wills his mind to calm, thinking about chemistry, complicated formulas, fish bait, live fish bait, anything to make his body calm too. Michael is stock still, probably staring at him, close enough to touch, which Adam shouldn’t even be thinking about because his erection is loving it. Not that he had any doubt it was entirely wired to Michael, the poor massage therapist’s hands a mere conduit for the spark to wake what’s been humming, waiting hungry, right under Adam’s skin.  
  
‘Michael’, he thinks, eyes squeezing tightly shut. ‘Make everyone forget I was even here? Please?’ He waits with baited breath.  
  
In a split second, he feels the shift in the air and cautiously cracks an eye open. His body sags in relief against the soft covers of the bed in their bedroom back home. His naked body but nothing’s perfect. He buries his face in the pillow. “Thanks.”  
  
A touch between his shoulders makes him start violently.  
  
Michael’s fingers freeze but then continue their journey up, over Adam’s neck, into his hair. Michael shivers or maybe Adam does or they both do – Adam doesn’t exactly have a frame of reference and doesn’t fucking need one right now, when everything in him calls for surrender.  
  
He breaks, like a log in a fire, suddenly at the brink of tears by how exhausting denial is. He has spent the better part of his entire adulthood locked up, outside and in, blocking, blocking, blocking. Needing Michael, wanting Michael might be ancient or recent, it doesn’t matter – Adam is done. He is gladly, ecstatically defeated.  
  
“Feels good,” he murmurs against the pillow, face still turning flaming red.  
  
Michael’s rasping voice makes him groan quietly. “I know.”  
  
Nails lightly scratch at Adam’s scalp, move down his neck, finger pads replacing them in gliding down Adam’s spine. He gulps as he feels them in the dip of his lower back. “Fuck,” he whispers without thinking.  
  
“I don’t know what’s better,” Michael breathes out, both palms sliding up Adam's back, squeezing his shoulders. “How it feels to me or how it feels to you. How do you not do this all the time? Touching.”  
  
Adam lets his forehead dig hard into the pillow, hands coming up to grab hold of the headrest for a long moment as he stretches with a sound close to a purr in his chest. “Dunno. Cause we’re morons?”  
  
He twists and meets Michael’s startled eyes, smiles at him, head still filled with the sound of splashing water. “Do you want to feel something better?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that some of you have checked out my profile and found my blog and my published novels. Thank you for your trust. I hope you enjoy both my original work and my fan fiction!


	11. Chapter 11

“Do you want to feel something better?”  
  
Michael says nothing, doesn’t even blink, but the luminous beckoning of his eyes makes Adam turn around and sit so they are face to face. He gives Michael a small smile, acutely aware of what he is about to do; it brings nothing but an all-encompassing sense of eager anticipation.  
  
Michael’s eyes roam his features in a rare example of great uncertainty and it warms Adam’s heart to no end to be allowed to witness it. He reaches for him, hand sliding over Michael’s neck, leans in and brings their lips together.  
  
It doesn’t seem different from all the other times Adam has kissed someone. He gives the boot to the distracting thought that he is kissing himself and presses in harder – knowing who he is _actually_ kissing makes the biggest difference from all the previous times and turns him giddy, nearly euphoric.  
  
Michael might as well be a stand-in for a wooden boy for how rigid his body is but Adam feels the emotional cauldron in the pit of his stomach as if it is in his own. It makes him shiver, urges him to keep kissing Michael until he has no breath left in his lungs.  
  
When he pulls away, his chest is heaving and he is convinced that his erection would give him a gleeful wave if it could. Michael is staring at him, eyes hooded, his lips parted as his tongue runs over them.  
  
Adam crushes the impulse to jump him. He clears his throat. “Is this all right?”  
  
“Yes. It’s all right.” Michael is boring his eyes into Adam’s, making him feel like his hair is turning flyaway with the current they’re locked in. His gaze begins slowly sliding down Adam’s arms, his chest and his belly, finally reaching his groin and resting there.  
  
Adam’s eyes fall shut as his entire being opens up. He savors it, the heaviness of Michael’s want for him, and he sinks into it, lets it compress his body and soul, unafraid. _It’s just another way for you to have me_ , he thinks. _It’s just another way of us being together.  
  
_When he opens his eyes, he finds he is literally being pressed down against the mattress under Michael’s naked body – only now does Adam realize that a minute ago, they were at a great disadvantage nudity-wise. Now they are slotted together seamlessly from head to toe, not a stitch of clothing between them. Michael is holding his face between his hands like none of Adam’s few lovers had done before and in a flash, it strikes him that he is hardly the expert here. They are on pretty much equal footing. Adam swallows and puts his hands over Michael’s.  
  
“You’ve seen me before,” he teases in a whisper but Michael shakes his head.  
  
“Not like this. Not for myself.” He drinks in Adam’s face as seconds tick by, until Adam is ready to dissolve, spun into eternity like the thread of Creation, pulsing with Michael’s own pulse. It’s dizzying, his toes are struggling to touch the bottom but Michael’s hands hold him, don’t let him drown.  
  
Adam surges up and kisses him, mouth already open, just as his legs fall open too. He brackets Michael between them and his hips rise in intuitive understanding, this time his lips and tongue mirroring their roll. Michael’s sharp intake of breath is like an echoing foghorn in Adam’s head. His kiss turns consummate; their faces turn and meet over and over as they find new angles of reassuring themselves this really feels as good as it does.  
  
Adam’s hands move from Michael’s neck onto his shoulders, travel down his back until they reach a divot. He takes a detour to the side there, grabs Michael by his buttocks and grinds their bodies together.  
  
He has to break away from the kiss, head thrown back with a groan as pleasure erupts in the pit of his stomach. Above him, Michael’s eyes have squeezed shut and his mouth is open, shocked; begging Adam to take advantage.  
  
He lifts himself on shaky elbows and kisses Michael without any finesse. It makes his ankles lock around Michael’s legs and his hips rise again, press and slide. “Like that,” he pants against Michael’s mouth, pulls away to look at him. He expects to see chaos and intoxication; the latter is all there but Michael’s gaze is oscillating, focused like a drill. He keeps one hand on Adam’s face while the other slides under Adam’s lower back. Eyes locked with Adam’s, Michael rolls their hips together again and again, until there’s nothing left but the need to sink all the way down.  
  
***  
  
Adam dozes off right away, body slumped against Michael’s side, twilight dispersing any resistance to sleep.  
  
He is woken up by a few cheerful rays of sunshine and he rouses, groggy, shading his eyes and squinting at the light. A few seconds later his eyebrows rise and he twists to glance at Michael’s peaceful form behind him. Maybe there’s more than one thing Adam learned Archangels could do today, seeing that the two of them are back to their mysterious holiday destination. At least Michael didn’t materialize them in a military zone in his sleep.  
  
Adam sits up with sluggish movements and digs his hands in the mattress, wrists supporting his balance as he gazes at the serene waters ahead. The veil-like curtains frame the view like a theatre stage; Adam believes he should be forgiven for wondering whether he’s the spectator here or it’s one of those experimental plays where the audience is actually cast in the performance without any prior knowledge.  
  
It’s a good metaphor for his adult life. His very unimaginative adult-life, the way it was headed, with which Adam would have probably been all right if he’d ever stopped to reflect on his trajectory back in the day. He went from spectator to support cast in the space of a day, with a weird detour to being dead; no one asked him about it, any of it.  
  
Now here he is with one of Heaven’s mightiest warriors in his bed and they might be in love. Adam might be; Archangel or not, it’s kind of presumptuous to think the other person is as much into you as you are into them. If God is the Director of the play, Adam sincerely doubts he ever saw this coming. Serves him right.  
  
He blinks quickly and bright dots dance in front of his eyes, imprints of the countless spots where the water is glistening under the sun. The dots mar Michael’s sleeping face when Adam turns to look at him again and he goggles a little to clear his vision.  
  
He watches Michael without any compunction; there is a discomfiting new sense of rightness in Adam – as in ‘having the right to’ in addition to ‘feeling right’ – that he hopes Michael won’t tap into straight away and misinterpret as Adam getting ahead of himself.  
  
He is such an asshat. Who worries about the status of their intimate relationship with an Archangel?  
  
Michael twitches, then stirs, a line forming between his eyebrows like a steel arrow between two bows. He is so formidable Adam is convinced the sea outside would part if Michael willed it. No one else understands just how formidable Michael is – not his enemies, not his soldiers, not his brothers, not the Winchesters. His power is bottomless and he is beautiful beyond words. No one else understands just how beautiful either.  
  
Adam is probably definitely in love with Michael.  
  
The lines on Michael’s face smooth out but he shifts, wakefulness rippling over his features and on cue, his eyes open.  
  
He turns his head and looks at Adam. Adam gives him a small smile and hopes he doesn’t look like a dork.  
  
“You brought us back here,” he says. Michael once made a comment about how humans seemed hardwired to point out the obvious. He said it with some amusement, so Adam doesn’t want to disappoint.  
  
Michael props himself up on his elbows and casts a look around. “Yeah, I did.” He frowns, gaze turning inward. “I felt strange and then I knew I was about to fall asleep. I moved us back here.” His gaze flits to Adam before turning fascinated with the curtains. “For protection while I was sleeping. That’s why.”  
  
Adam can’t help his grin. He blames it on the post-orgasmic soup his brain is still swimming in. “That wasn’t why and you know it.”  
  
He finally slides back into bed, on his stomach. Michael turns his head to him, unruffled.  
  
“You got me.” His lips turn crooked. It’s way too attractive. “Is that what you want to focus on?” he continues and Adam’s eyes widen. He isn’t exactly opposed to it but he was not prepared to have The Talk a minute after they’re both awake.  
  
“I slept, Adam,” Michael emphasizes.  
  
The meaning of his words arrives to Adam after a beat but Michael appears quite unperturbed so Adam relaxes a little. He bites his tongue just before pointing out that archangels don’t sleep – no one likes an overkill – and settles on, “Do you know why?”  
  
“I don’t but I can make an educated guess.” Michael shifts and turns bodily to Adam. “In Heaven, it was speculated that angels sharing a bond with their vessels, an especially strong bond, would become able to…absorb some human abilities. It was frowned upon.” A shadow passes over Michael’s face.  
  
“You don’t…” Adam shushes his sinking heart, tries to reframe his question. “Was it like, they weren’t…I don’t know. Pure anymore?”  
  
Michael shakes his head. “The fear was that they would be contaminated by weakness. An angel was supposed to be a soldier of Heaven, nothing else. Nothing was supposed to interfere with the mission.”  
  
Adam doesn’t have much to say to that, no matter whether he likes it or not. It’s not like it’s news to him anyway. But things have shaken up a lot out there, while he and Michael were stuck in the Cage. He can recall vividly what happened between the two of them before they fell asleep, too, and Michael took part as enthusiastically as Adam did.  
  
“Some speculated further,” Michael adds musingly. “They speculated the process went both ways. All those humans who could heal with a touch. Many of them had been possessed by angels.”  
  
Adam’s mind is whirring, trying to process the implications of what he’s hearing. One thing presents itself with modest simplicity. “So you can eat burgers now?”  
  
Michael starts laughing.  
  
It’s a sight to behold if Adam was in enough possession of his mental faculties to be beholding anything. He is stunned, bowled over, thrown so out of loop he doesn’t remember his last bearings.  
  
Michael turns his radiant gaze back on him and it’s like two hands scooping Adam in and bringing him back into the loop. A hand literally reaches for him and Michael caresses his jaw. “I suppose. Seeing that I’ve been cracked open to experience human pleasures.”  
  
Adam is not proficient in smirking, it’s just not his thing, but sometimes the mouth’s got to do what the mouth’s got to do. It also wants to kiss Michael pretty bad and who is Adam to stand in the way?  
  
Michael responds by pulling Adam on top of himself, arms closing over Adam’s body.  
  



	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to stop and thank my generous, eagle-eyed, beta for all the amazing support she's been giving me on this, chapter after chapter. Thank you, canon_is_relative.<3

Adam, having hours of pleasantly idle time on his hands to contemplate, is stunned to discover he has never had a proper holiday until now. True, when he tumbled down to Hell he was just a boy but still, it’s almost embarrassing.   
  
He eats juicy fruit and goes for a swim, he has amazing massages without any awkward occurrences, he watches the sunset while having fresh seafood and wine. Yes, he drinks wine. It’s an extremely odd thing, having an archangel for a lover and for some reason, as a side-effect, invisible dots have joined in Adam’s head to the shape of a glass of wine.  
  
“Maybe I think it’s classier,” he tells Michael with a smirk, a bit melancholy on the inside, as he muses out loud about his new wining and dining habits. He doesn’t elaborate on what that’s got to do with Michael. “Or, I don’t know… More adult?”  
  
“Do you enjoy it?” Michael is looking at him. If it wasn’t for those other times when his gaze is like an oncoming tempest of desire, Adam would be worried he was regarded as a beloved pet – such is the fondness in my Michael’s eyes for him sometimes.  
  
“I do, yeah.” He takes another sip of his glass and sighs, tips his head back. He gets a different buzz out of wine. Beer turns him goofy and eventually sleepy. Wine makes him both languid and daring.  
  
Michael says nothing further on the matter but takes him to bed shortly after, the last rays of sunshine outside not even done streaking the sky with their carmine brush. Adam shivers when he feels Michael’s hands, breath, mouth, as material as anything, and his head swims with the impossibility of it all. He closes his eyes and blames the wine.  
  
***  
  
They haven’t talked about how long they’ll be staying, about what they’re going back to, about where they’ve found themselves with regards to each other.   
  
It doesn’t bother Adam, any of it. Not after the Cage. The Cage didn’t rewrite who he is, he is now pretty sure of it, which Michael expressed with words to similar effect once. (If Adam was a vainer creature he’d have thought there was more than fondness for him in there, maybe something akin to wonderment.) Naturally, Adam’s sense of perspective is no longer that of a mere mortal, either, he knows that with great certainty too. So a day is exactly a day for him, while also, it is all there is to existence. It’s less than a heartbeat and more than a century but somehow Adam doesn’t lose his whereabouts along the line between the two.   
  
He does, however, need to stick to those things that secure his place among the better half of the human race. One of them is being a team player, recognizing you are not alone on the freaking planet and considering that your actions have repercussions for others.  
  
“I can make them forget you were gone,” Michael tells him, frowning. “They’ll never remember you didn’t show up for work. It doesn’t matter if it’s for a few days or for a few weeks.”  
  
“That’s not the point.” Adam is going around the room, collecting the few mementoes he’s planning to take back home. If one of them is an actual shell necklace, sue him. “They won’t remember I was gone but it won’t change the fact they were one man down for weeks, my coworkers must be breaking their backs covering for me.” He stops and faces Michael, who’s standing with his back to the big doors leading outside. Stirred by the breeze, their fine white curtains are fluttering behind him not unlike wings.   
  
Adam shakes his mesmerized self off and wraps up his argument. “And not knowing what happened to me, even if you make them forget later? Nah. I need to go back.” He smiles at Michael, feeling surprisingly timid for what his brazen brain has to add. “We can go to another Love Island soon again.”  
  
“That’s not the name of this island.” Michael, adorably, looks smug. “You should keep guessing.”  
  
“I wasn’t saying it was.” Adam refrains from rolling his eyes, grinning instead, walking over to Michael. “It’s a turn of phrase.”   
  
Michael values eye rolls highly and has use for them. “You humans and your turns of phrase.” His smirk now has a distinctly sweeter flavor, though. Adam stops close enough for their lips to brush should either lean in. Then he waits.  
  
The world is stretched to infinity between one second and the next before the familiar surroundings of their living room tell Adam Michael has respected his wishes. His brain takes a split second longer to register the two women and one man looking at them. In that split second, Michael roars a NO—

—Adam feels as if his blood, all of it, drains out of his body at once.   
  
He drops to the floor, neck twisted painfully, eyes staring at the smoking sigils on the wall where one of the women’s hand is still pressed. Conceit is written all over her, from the twist of her mouth to her hair put together in a heavy bun held by pearls and shiny stones.   
  
Adam can’t breathe. He has no control over his body, either. He is made of straw, he is the smoke of burnt straw, he is the ash…   
  
“Relax,” a voice reaches him but he is spinning on a merry-go-round too fast to be able to do anything than glance for a sickening moment at the speaking face. It looms closer but keeps appearing in flashes and Adam has to close his eyes, reaches blindly to steady himself, make it stop, get off…  
  
“Hey! Don’t start freaking out on us, boy!” A male voice. There is a sharp prod somewhere on his body, it could be anywhere, shin or ribs or face, it could even be someone else’s body, Adam doesn’t know, doesn’t _understand_ what is happening to him.  
  
“Your guardian angel has vacated these here premises that is you.” Still the man. “He’s gone, mate. Poof, gone. You’re on your own so pull yourself together. You’re all right, stop bleeding flapping about.” Strong hands press Adam against the ground and he is ready, ready to be swallowed by it again, plummet down to the Cage, Michael, Michael, Michael…  
  
The voices around him keep talking but Adam is already sinking in.  
  
***  
  
When he comes to, he is tied up to a chair in their kitchen.   
  
His body is made of wet sand and lead. Adam would put good money on corpses that spend weeks in the water feeling the same way. If they could give any feedback, that is. Some of them probably could. Zombies, there are zombies in this world, and ghouls, _fuck_.   
  
“We are witches,” says a voice behind him and the woman with the pearls in her hair walks around to face him. “The rest of those base creatures could all die tomorrow, for all I care.” Through the throbbing of his head – God, his head weighs a ton, how does the neck support anything so heavy? – Adam registers she doesn’t speak like anyone he knows.  
  
“Who are you?” He startles at the voice, looks madly around, until something in his mouth, a residue of different air at the back of his throat, tells him it’s his own voice. That’s what he sounds like?   
  
A very distant memory whispers, _yes_.  
  
“Who we are is none of your concern, silly boy.” The other woman, very different face but remarkably similar to the first one in what they are both wearing. Frilly blouses and big, long skirts, lots of pearls all over them. They look like something out of a book. That’s what people looked like decades, maybe centuries ago, Adam thinks, but can’t go any further than that. His neck is like a toothpick supporting a freaking melon.   
  
There’s the sound of a door opening and heavy steps coming closer. Adam lifts his head with a groan, grateful it stays on, then blinks to clear his vision. The man. Mustache, beard, and a cap over his head obscuring his eyes. He looks unkempt. He’s chewing on an actual toothpick. Jesus Christ. Adam groans again.   
  
He must have asked what they want, because Pearl Woman number one says, “An exchange. You are the currency.” The other one fishes something out of her little bag, a vial with a glowing lilac liquid in it. Adam manages a good look because it’s headed for his mouth. He can’t even put up a real fight and the contents of the vial are quickly down his throat.   
  
He wants to spit them out or at least just spit but he can’t. It’s as if he’s been given a brand new puppet to command, a hundred strings attached to it, and it’s so confounding, just to be in charge, he doesn’t even attempt any choreography. An irrational fear petrifies him further: that he would make it worse, scramble all the strings until cutting them all would be the only way, leaving Adam a heap of flesh and bone, ready to be buried.  
  
Something must be working after all because he hears that voice, his voice, again. “What was that?” It’s a croak, but not made worse by what he just swallowed. Though, how would he know? How do you assess whether you’ve ended up with a new scratch if there are already gashes all over your body?   
  
“A potion,” says Pearl Woman number two. “Nothing crude. Your mental state will start deteriorating and in a few hours, you won’t know who you are or what is real anymore. Our plan is to let you roam the streets of an unsavory part of one of this country’s big cities.” The way she says it, there is no doubt she despises ‘this country,’ and in the briefest burst of clarity, Adam thinks: Not American. European.   
  
“Not remembering anything, you can’t contact him,” the other woman adds. “He’d better hurry and show up before we let you out. Who knows what misfortunes might befall you. And, of course, in twenty-four hours you’ll be dead.”   
  
His tongue feels foreign in his own mouth but Adam forces himself to slur the word: “Why?”  
  
“It’s how they could get what they want, innit?” The man speaks, his gruffness, bizarrely, more welcome than the way the two witches are talking and acting. It chills him to the bone, and that’s beside the actual meaning of their words, on which Adam doesn’t wish to focus.   
  
Meanwhile, Pearls number one looks down her nose at him. “We have the antidote. The sooner the archangel is present, the quicker we can all put this unpleasant business behind us.”  
  
Panic seizes Adam in a clutch so strong he suddenly finds himself on the floor for a second time today, looking sideways at his assailants’ feet: two dainty pairs and one pair of plain black shoes. All dainty shoes step back quickly and he is sure he hears a muffled gasp. Adam twists his neck to look up and finds the man glaring down at him but from his new vantage point, Adam glimpses some fear in his eyes. “He is too strong,” the man says, but then hauls Adam up together with his chair as if he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes. “I’d watch him.”  
  
“Yes, yes, thank you,” one of the women says, impatient, but Adam has already squeezed his eyes shut.   
  
He begins whispering in his head, a litany of half-words, half-thoughts, desperate and frantic, but their meaning has the clarity of mountain water: begging Michael to keep away, stay far, far away. In the deepest recesses of Adam’s mind there’s a small rebellion pleading for Adam’s own survival but it is doomed the second it is born.  
  
Yes, he is afraid. Terrified, in fact. But he is also bereft beyond the telling of it, every cell in his body wailing for Michael. The prospect of somehow surviving this ordeal but having Michael dead, being _without_ him, knowing he brought it on Michael, whatever gruesome fate these monsters have for him…   
  
Adam is a simple guy, never shone at anything, never even had a larger than life personality. He is a simple guy and things come to him in plain terms. There are worse fates than death, that’s a truth. Much worse, so his terror at whatever the immediate future holds is like a Lego Death Star in front of the real thing. That’s what he knows, so he prays and prays, pouring into it all his conviction.  
  
Around him, the three voices flow into each other and Adam senses more than hears their doubt as the clock keeps ticking. It’s dark outside but he doesn’t remember anymore if it was day or night when he and Michael materialized in the house. He doesn’t remember if his unwanted visitors told him what exactly they want from Michael. He doesn’t remember where he and Michael had been – he only knows it must have been somewhere good, because his frantic mind burrows inside the feeling as if Adam himself could hide in it.  
  
“He is taking his time,” a woman’s voice says and he strains to remember. A witch. A danger. “He ought to have been here immediately. How long does it take to find some dimwit to say yes in the New World?”  
  
“I did say you place too much importance on the value of the human.” Another woman. Witch, Adam, _witch_. He coughs, moans, his throat parched. He has kept his eyes shut, it slows down everything. He’s afraid that if he opens them, his precious hold on reality will start leaking out of his eye sockets faster.  
  
“That one ain’t looking as bad as he should, either.” A male voice, rough. “But yeah, Michael’s taking his time.” Adam’s heard that before. He doesn’t try to grasp the words, but does hold on to his response to them: _Good.  
  
_ The tremor starts under his feet and rapidly grows into a convulsion of the whole house, Adam with it, things rattling and windows breaking, shards of glass flying everywhere but contrary to all human instincts Adam’s eyes fly open.  
  
A figure materializes out of thin air and a mighty lightning makes the darkened house seem incandescent. The brilliant light illuminates the figure and Adam could barely look at it through his eyes narrowed into slits.   
  
Then he sees and his heart seizes in shock and awe.  
  
Dean Winchester lifts his head, face withering, while the shadow of magnificent wings opens up on the wall behind him.


	13. Chapter 13

Adam stares at Dean, afraid to blink and disperse the incredible experience of seeing а myriad of images all at once. It’s like a divine optical illusion: there is his half-brother and there is the most powerful archangel in Creation. Their features aren’t overlaying, though, they just seem to exist together. Michael’s are those of a thousand faces and bodies rippling together, all manmade—  
  
Which is how Adam knows his own brain is responsible for what he is seeing.  
  
Once, in the Cage, they had talked about Michael’s appearance. Adam tried to wrap his mind around the idea of a being having no form as such, being just…energy, from what he understood. It was important, for some reason, to extend that conversation – it was as if Adam needed to scale Michael down, make him more fathomable. Bring him closer. It had already been just the two of them, both Sam and Lucifer gone. Adam remembers the clenching of his stomach as the conversation went on. He had instinctively wanted to keep his excessive curiosity over Michael’s looks a secret.  
  
A question had occurred to him to keep it going. ‘All right, can you tell me, then: of all the images people have drawn and painted, all that’s out there, which one do you like the most?’ Adam had faltered, correcting himself. ‘Which one do you look at and think: All right, if I’m walking the Earth, that’s the one I choose to look like.’  
  
Michael took his time replying, face inscrutable. ‘I can tell you of one that I find pleasing,’ he offered eventually. ‘It is a depiction of me in the Eastern-Orthodox tradition, a Bulgarian one. It is very obscure but I heard someone pray to me once, gazing at the image, with so much faith and devotion. Just me, not my Father.’  
  
Michael had looked miles away. By then Adam had long loathed those mental distances between them, his fear irrational but strong nonetheless. ‘Let me show you,’ Michael refocused on him. ‘Close your eyes.’  
  
Adam did and Michael took him on a tour where with incredible speed they touched upon the many ways humanity had tried to imagine Archangel Michael’s visage.  
  
Until the image was there, the one Michael wanted Adam to see. White wings, long blond hair, a halo, a sword and a shield. Long face with a surprisingly gentle, serious expression. Big, big eyes; soulful under finely drawn dark eyebrows. The resemblance to a woman was impossible to miss yet there was also an inherent masculine air about the image. The fluidity was stark – it was as if the sum of all parts produced an image that shifted and refused to be defined as one or the other.  
  
The wings kept drawing Adam’s eye, something about the modest fold, the gentle slope, the creamy color, the sharp peaks where bones met. They looked fragile, he had thought, in contrast with the warrior’s attire.  
  
The picture showed a depiction like nothing Adam had expected. It was then it dawned on him just how complete his own perception of Michael already was. Michael was Adam was Michael was Adam was Michael…  
  
“Took you long enough,” says Pearls number one, jolting Adam out of his reverie. The illusion shatters; Michael, looking like Dean Winchester, is standing in the room with all of them. “You kept us waiting,” the woman continues and Adam thinks few things are more hateful than unjustified arrogance. She whispers something under her breath and he looks at Michael to see if he has noticed. It doesn’t seem so.  
  
“You presume to put me on a time table?” Michael’s voice is cold, his own arrogance a dark beast. “You come into my home, you cast me out?” His gaze doesn’t even flick to Adam, but his air turns arctic. “You harm and poison my vessel? You, who are worse than the mud on the floor in Lucifer’s Cage—”  
  
“You mean your Cage,” the woman interrupts.  
  
Only Michael’s eyes show his furious incredulity. He snaps his fingers.  
  
Nothing happens.  
  
“I’m sure the mud couldn’t do these kind of tricks,” the woman says blithely, indicating herself. “This house is warded, no one can get in or out now. No one has _any_ powers here, not your kind, not demons, not other witches. Not even God himself.”  
  
“Sister,” the other woman says warningly. “Ernelia…”  
  
But Ernelia continues smoothly. “ _We_ are warded against your powers. If you want to waste any more time being a rectitudinous, insufferable egomaniac, be my guest. Meanwhile, your old vessel…” The way she says the word ‘old’ feels like a plunge of a knife. “Now he, I’m afraid, is definitely on a time table. Tick-tock.”  
  
There is silence in the room, everyone frozen, watching each other. Adam feels as if he’s made of bags full of sand, a scarecrow of sorts, with a thousand tiny holes in him. Each breath he takes, his memories flow out of him; with each exhale, he grows lighter in substance. He’ll be nothing but rough cloth soon, until that disappears too.  
  
On cue, Michael points at him. “Give him the cure.”  
  
“A bottle for a bottle.” The second woman speaks just as the man takes a step closer to Michael and throws a small bottle in his direction.  
  
Under Michael’s imperial gaze, it lands on the floor and shatters.  
  
The man looks startled and sheepish. The other woman – Ernelia, Adam remembers with great effort – squints at Michael, nostrils flaring. She rummages in her ornate bag; the bag is hanging on a metal chain that shines, golden. Her hand comes out holding two small bottles, one full of some dark liquid, the other empty. She passes the empty bottle to her sister who hesitates, but then steps slowly in Michael’s direction. Once she’s within arm’s reach, she extends her hand. “Your grace in exchange of your vessel’s life,” she says.  
  
Adam’s jaw drops at the simplicity of the request.  
  
Michael stares the woman down, his handsome face set in dark condescension. _Dean_ _’s face_ , something whispers in Adam’s mind.  
  
With growing horror, he realizes he can’t remember who Dean is.  
  
He flails inwardly and finds something, in the pit of his stomach. An odd sense of resentment, something old but brand new too. There is also begrudging trust. Friend or foe, even that’s hard to tell so Adam watches warily as Michael extends his own hand and takes the empty bottle.  
  
“How can I trust you?” he asks.  
  
The woman who handed Michael the bottle takes a few quick steps back as her sister speaks, “You have our word.”  
  
“Your word?” Dean’s eyebrows are designed perfectly to arch in Michael’s contempt. “Your word, you, mere bacteria upon this earth?”  
  
Both women draw themselves up and speak over each other. Adam struggles to tell them apart anymore. One of them voices an angry protest while the other one is saying a name Adam instantly forgets. “That’s who we are,” she continues, voice ringing alone, the pride in it thick. “The most powerful coven that ever existed. No one can come close to our traditions, our history, no matter how much they try. No witches are left who can be our match. All will bow to our authority now, as they should.”  
  
Michael finally moves. He stands face to face with the witch who was just speaking. Adam notices a flicker of fear in her eyes but she doesn’t step back.  
  
“My grace is to be an instrument in the petty games for dominion among your lowly species?”  
  
“Your grace is the most powerful ingredient in this universe, with the exception of God’s own breath.”  
  
Adam hardly registers her words, mind reeling. God is _real_? _God_ is real.  
  
He must have made a sound, perhaps groaned or shaken himself, because Michael’s attention is on him. _He is beautiful_ , Adam can’t help but think, whoever this man is, even with his features set in such a mask of fear and anger.  
  
Michael stalks around the room, throwing glances over his shoulder to Adam, to the women, to their male companion, who is watching him, alert, hand inside his coat. Comparisons with caged majestic animals arrive readily to Adam’s wooly head and he is grateful for them, for their triteness, for such straws left for him to clutch. It’s something resembling a straightforward thought.  
  
With a cross between a grunt and a growl, Michael stops as far away from the witches as possible. He points to Adam. “Go to him. Have the serum at the ready.”  
  
The woman holding the tiny bottle with the liquid beckons to the man. Adam notices she is wearing gloves, lace and silk, their buttons shiny beads. He is still gazing at her hand when his head is tipped back. At least it’s not rough, and the scent emanating from the open bottle is nice as well.  
  
Through slits he watches Michael open the empty bottle and tip his own head back, exposing his throat. His index finger slides over the skin and brilliant light erupts in its wake. Adam has to close his eyes, unable to watch, unwilling to. He no longer knows why this is wrong or how it is his fault. He doesn’t know who the people in the room with him are, nor where he is. He only knows his name is Adam Milligan and that, there, is Michael, the archangel, who is way, way too far.  
  
“Take it,” Michael is speaking. There is a creak as someone walks around and then the cool, rounded edge of a glass vial is pressed against his lips. Adam opens his eyes and meets Michael’s as he swallows the liquid being given to him.  
  
He blinks, unsure of what to expect, then shakes his head. Marginally clearer. He looks at Michael, at a loss. Nothing makes much sense to him and the woman who speaks by the table where she is arranging something in a bowl with hasty movements doesn’t help either.  
  
“He should recover in a few minutes. He won’t die in a matter of hours either.” The other woman, her sister, Adam’s mind supplies, joins her by the table. The guy has produced a shiny golden blade that he is holding pointed at Michael while moving to join the two women. “But he is like a ticking bomb, you could say,” Pearls number two adds, sprinkling something inside her sister’s bowl. Adam strains but can’t see anything.  
  
Then the meaning of what was said arrives to him and he turns a shocked gaze to Michael. “Is she talking about me?” he asks, his voice foreign to his own ears.  
  
Michael doesn’t seem to share the experience, however, judging by the way his face clears, as if Adam has overcome a lifelong affliction of mutism.  
  
He barely has the time to nod at him, or smile, when Michael’s eyes shift to the trio by the table. Pearls number two is murmuring something indecipherable while her sister sends a spark into the bowl that seems to come directly from her fingers. Adam has to admit he is impressed.  
  
“We’ll be off now,” Pearls number one says. Ernelia. “But we’ll be in touch, if we run out of your precious commodity.”  
  
She hasn’t even finished speaking when the house starts shaking as if an earthquake of the highest magnitude is rocking the Earth. Things fall crashing down and a terrible creaking sound makes Adam groan. He ducks to avoid the pieces of ceiling falling on his head, dust landing everywhere like snow. He wills himself to stay calm, pictures himself in all his helplessness and rejects it with a surge of ferocity that has him blanking out.  
  
When he looks up a moment later, the space around him is clear of the biggest chunks of debris, he has busted out of his ropes, and has somehow remained seated. His assailants have lost their balance and landed on the floor in the case of Pearls number two and the guy. Ernelia is on her knees trying to find purchase on the swinging table and stand up.  
  
The same creaking sound permeates the air and Adam realizes it’s the walls. The walls being torn apart. The house is falling apart and crying, he thinks in a daze, as he coughs and hunches over his legs, arms coming up to cover his head.  
  
He doesn’t dare to look up when he hears more steps and the sound of people fighting, a female voice crying out. Adam tries to get up on his feet, blindly, but they give out from under him after their prolonged disuse. He ends up on the floor for what seems the fifth time in one day but he does look around at last.  
  
He sees Michael, chin lifted, immobile, but the tremors around them finally cease. He sees two newcomers next, who must have walked in through the wall that has half-crumbled down.  
  
One is very tall, long hair, face in pinched determination as he grabs hold of Ernelia just as she reaches for the bowl. He murmurs something in a strange tongue in her ear and it makes her go limp. She looks up to him in dismay and then her eyes narrow, the spite in them making the hairs on the back of Adam’s neck stand.  
  
Sam Winchester. The name arrives to Adam but the entry to it is still blank.  
  
The other man looks like a cross between Jehovah’s witness and angry cat. He is holding the golden blade – an archangel blade – blood dripping from it. At his feet, the second sister is lying face down, obviously dead. Their male ‘bodyguard’ is cowering on the floor next to her, gray with dust.  
  
“Please, please, spare me, they made me, please, Michael...” His hands lift, fingers pressing together and he continues his litany, shifting on his knees, hands clasped in prayer.  
  
Michael walks through the debris and looks down to him. “I shall spare you,” he says, “and you shall be my messenger. Tell everyone that I am _Michael._ I am not to be disturbed.” The man’s whimpers only serve to emphasize the grandeur in Michael’s voice and stance.  
  
That grandeur disappears when he kneels in front of Adam. Michael touches his forehead and sweeping relief makes Adam keel over before Michael’s hand steadies him, then helps him up. Adam sways on his feet.  
  
“I’m good,” he says, uselessly, but he is, he is feeling so good, he has to speak it or he’ll burst.  
  
Michael’s gaze lingers and time slows down. Between one blink and the next Adam sees him, the other man. Dean.  
  
Dean Winchester. Sam’s brother.  
  
He is so goddamn gorgeous, Adam has to stop himself from reaching to touch.  
  
 _Who are you?_ he thinks.  
  
 _‘You are my_ true _vessel but not my only one.’_  
  
The words arrive to Adam out of nowhere but they are not his reply to his own question. It’s Michael speaking. Adam doesn’t understand how since they’re not sharing a body anymore. They’re not sharing anything, even their house is a wreck. Michael is where he is supposed to be, with who he’s supposed to be, at long last, after all this time.  
  
He has to look away for a moment and Michael tracks his movement, ducks his head and, wordless, watches Adam. Something like impotence blooms on his face and it quickly darkens, then he straightens up, walks around the sniveling man on the floor and stands in front of Ernelia.  
  
She stares him in the face but it’s impossible to miss the tremors in her body.  
  
“You thought you could come and interfere with my life?” There is venom in Michael’s voice Adam isn’t sure he’s ever heard before. “That your pathetic little spells could work against me, trap me, deplete me of my powers for long? They didn’t work against them.” Michael points at Sam and Castiel.  
  
It’s Castiel. He is an angel, Adam remembers. Sam is…? An ally?  
  
“How can you still have any powers left?” Ernelia spits out the words. “It’s not possible. We checked you, we read you. We made sure…”  
  
The curl of Michael’s mouth is bitter and sweet, sad and incandescently happy. Dean’s mouth. Adam can only drink in the sight and feel a knot in his chest at how perfect that mouth is to be imbued with any simple or complex meaning. “You read me?” Michael repeats, the mockery chilling. “You read wrong.”  
  
He puts his index and middle fingers on the witch’s forehead and she begins shaking, her skin turning slowly grey, then black, her mouth open in a silent scream. Adam wants to turn away, convinced he can’t watch anymore, but finds out he can, hypnotized, all the way until her flesh disappears entirely down in an avalanche of soot-like flakes. Her skull and skeleton hang suspended in the air for a split second, old-fashioned dainty clothes hanging grotesquely, before everything drops to the floor with a crash.  
  
At some point Sam has stepped back and let Ernelia go. Adam finds the grim disgust on his face reflect his own feeling—  
  
Brother.  
  
Sam and Dean Winchester are his brothers. John Winchester was their father.  
  
“Are you all right?” Michael speaks next to him.  
  
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t feel any different,” Adam tells him, shrugging. “So I don’t know what she meant, a time bomb.”  
  
“It’s a spell. It died with her. I burnt it in her mind.”  
  
Behind Adam, Sam steps closer. He is looking at Michael, a cautious look but there is an edge to it; twice now, within a short space of time, Adam’s skin breaks into goosebumps.  
  
“It’s done,” Sam says. The low soft timbre of his voice is always a surprise to Adam. “Are you going to leave my brother now?”  
  
Adam turns and meets Michael’s gaze head-on without meaning to. The emptiness is still there, to his very core. His mind on the other hand is brimming but it’s just his thoughts, just his own thoughts, clamoring in their uncertainty and grief.  
  
This is what insanity must be like. He cannot comprehend how anything can be trusted, how anything can ever make any sense if the only voice he ever hears is his own.  
  
But then his every cell is stretched until it’s on the precipice of splitting into two and he is swimming in liquid gold that’s seeping into him through those thousand holes he feared eons ago.  
  
‘Do you take me back?’ _Michael._ 'Adam, be my vessel.'  
  
“Yes.”  
  
______________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
The image of himself Michael shows Adam:  
  



	14. Chapter 14

They part with Sam, Dean and Castiel on cautiously good terms. It helps that Michael left Dean as soon as Sam had asked. (“I felt traces of the other Michael,” his Michael will tell Adam later. “I felt the brutality of possessing a vessel against their will.”) It helps, too, that Dean’s last words, to Adam or Michael it is unclear, are, “If you ever need us…we’ll be there.”  
  
Even the division of ‘property’ is done fifty-fifty, like an unspoken reinforcement of their new dynamic. Adam stays in the passenger’s seat, watches Michael retrieve the vial containing his grace from the floor where it had fallen and hand it over to Dean. “Keep this. Make sure you guard it well.”  
  
Dean takes it, expression grave, but it is Sam who replies. “We will.”  
  
Michael doesn’t elaborate as to what use the Winchesters might have of archangel grace but Adam doesn’t think he will ever cross that line – of putting into spoken word his intent to aid the hand that aims to strike his Father.  
  
He bends over to pick up the archangel sword next. “Since I am the only Archangel left in this Universe,” he says, “but others might end up visiting, I’m going to keep this and lower the odds of my demise.”  
  
“I don’t know what that dude was thinking anyway,” Dean comments with a gruff eye-roll, “brandishing it like he could do any harm.”  
  
“Human beings believe they are invincible,” Michael says to the room at large, tone almost lyrical. “In addition, you tend to lose what little reason you have in the heat of the moment.”  
  
Adam doesn’t think Michael notices the look Dean gives Sam behind his back. _Who died and made him human expert_ , it says, but then Castiel chips in, attracting Dean’s bemused scowl. “That is a fair assessment.”  
  
Of the present company, Michael’s feelings for Castiel are the most complicated. There is still wrath that Castiel abandoned his duty, but now that wrath is dueling with begrudging understanding. There is anger too; distrust. The last time they all met, Castiel had tricked Michael into showing up and then trapped him. He later provoked Michael into a fit of rage only to serve as the proverbial bearer of bad news. Michael understands Castiel’s motivation but nothing changes the fact that the black hole at his center where his devotion to God used to be was triggered open by this particular angel.  
  
Their history predating the fall wouldn’t earn Castiel a glowing endorsement, either, yet Adam taps into something quieter, warmer. Kinship. Castiel is a child of Heaven; he served under Michael’s grand command for millennia. They come from the same tree, even if Michael had been the bird of Paradise perched on the very top and Castiel one of the million ants working at the base of the tree.  
  
(“What is the truth?” Michael will wonder aloud later. “So much has changed and I have to stop and ask myself now. Would Heaven have existed without the lowest rank angels? Then look what happened after I fell. We were all important.”)  
  
Adam observes it all, powered down gratefully, letting Michael have his full use of him like a blessed homecoming. He only rises to higher consciousness when his brothers are taking their leave. “Goodbye, Adam,” Sam says and Adam asks Michael to let him speak. “And I need you to stop listening for a bit,” he adds as soon as Michael acquiesces. “Please. I’ll tell you everything later but I need this, for myself.”  
  
He pulls Sam away, Dean’s curious frown bringing a kind of petty pleasure that Adam is embarrassingly glad Michael can’t sense.  
  
Sam waits for Adam to speak, expectant and looking a little concerned in his confidential hunch over him. The guy is huge. Adam is not short but the allusion to ants returns briefly, when he has to look up to meet Sam’s eyes.  
  
They haven’t spoken, just the two of them, since before the Cage, he realizes. He was acting on impulse asking to talk to Sam. He is still recovering from the sudden twist of his day; the last thing he expected when he woke up to the wind chimes at the resort this morning was to see his half-brothers again.  
  
He has something very particular to ask but now their shared history looms over them, dwarfing even Sam. Left to his own devices without Michael’s presence as a background noise, Adam looks into Sam’s eyes to find images and sounds from the Cage – few real, many imagined in feverish nightmares – flooding him.  
  
“Adam?” Sam finally prompts. That voice. Hearing it now against hearing it then. Adam gulps.  
  
“Are you all right, Sam?” The question is inane, stupid beyond words, but Adam has to ask it, at last, after all this time.  
  
Bewildered, Sam takes a moment to reply. “Yeah. Why?”  
  
“Just, the last time you and I saw each other down there—”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam interrupts. Adam believes the reassurance, just as he believes that Sam is not ready to talk about it. Probably will never be. You can heal by acknowledgement but it doesn’t mean you want to relive what you’ve come to terms with. Adam gets that.  
  
“Are you?” Sam asks. “All right?”  
  
“Oh yeah.” Adam nods. “Yeah, I’m all right. I’m good.” It’s the truest thing he’s ever said.  
  
Sam throws his brother a glance, probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it.  
  
Out of the blue Adam wonders what Dean is seeing when looking at him, now that he has let Michael in. Does he, too, have that extra sense now, allowing him to see the inexplicable: Adam and not Adam, that composite image of every artistic rendition of Michael’s?  
  
Does he see himself now? The question distracts Adam badly, makes him want to turn his back, abscond from Dean’s gaze.  
  
“Listen,” Sam says, jolting his attention back to himself. At least he doesn’t seem to be seeing anything but Adam. “I know we said we’re sorry,” Sam continues, “but I wanted you to know. We really are.” Dean might have gotten the expressive face, but sincerity thrives on Sam’s features. When he is earnest, it’s like stepping into a summer meadow. You just want to believe him, even if it goes against your common sense or instinct.  
  
What an incongruous choice for Lucifer’s one true vessel.  
  
“Like I said, we’re just so used to losing people—” Sam continues but Adam cuts him off.  
  
“Yeah, I know. Apology accepted but that’s just a load of crap, you know that, right?”  
  
Sam looks startled, then his chest jumps with his scoff. “Yeah, fair enough.” His tone turns serious. “Things got really messed up. For a long time. It was one thing after the other. We just…” He squares his shoulders as if he’s about to receive a blow, not deliver it. Maybe that’s the case, Adam thinks, when Sam finishes, “We kind of forgot about you. I’m sorry, I really am. I guess it was easier that way with all the rest of it coming at us.”  
  
“All right,” Adam says slowly. As honesty goes, that’s right on the blood, sweat and tears money, and he appreciates it more than the bullshit Sam sold him the last time. The Winchesters were busy, and they had each other. His knowledge of them is a little fragmented but a picture has coalesced and Adam is not actually stupid. They had each other.  
  
Which brings him to his original reason for wanting to speak with Sam.  
  
“Listen, back then, before we fell – why we fell – you took control of Lucifer.” Sam is listening, a deep line between his eyebrows. “Dean was there.” Adam used to wonder, early on, before it stopped mattering. Now the topic has acquired a fresh spin for him. “Did he somehow snap you out of it?”  
  
Sam’s face smooths out in such heartfelt, awed surprise, it makes Adam look away, a little uncomfortable. His gaze falls on Dean who is watching Sam with his own face chasing after his brother’s expression. Castiel in turn is watching Dean and his features rearrange in confused interest. He turns to look at Sam and the motion teases Sam’s peripheral vision, so he looks back at Castiel and Dean. It’s like a bizarre domino effect.  
  
“Yeah, I guess he did,” Sam says, refocusing on Adam. “I mean, I’ve never even talked to anyone about it but yeah. That was how it happened.” Sam swallows hard, eyes glazed with the memory. “I was watching myself beating up my brother and freaking out, then I just thought—” Sam shakes his head. “It’s like you said. I got Lucifer by the balls.” He blinks a few times, gaze back on Adam, collected. “Why are you asking?”  
  
“Because it happened to me too.” He hesitates if he should tell Sam about their encounter with Amara but decides that whatever Michael saw fit to share he did. “Michael said things happen sometimes,” Adam goes on, “when the angel and the vessel have bonded, like, pretty strong. There’s a transfer or something. I didn’t think that was the case with you and Lucifer but I just had to ask.”  
  
Sam has been listening to him with baited breath, a shadow on his face that now clears a bit. “But he’s not keeping you a prisoner, right? You just said ‘yes’ to him again and he…Is he listening right now?”  
  
“No, I asked him to stay away.”  
  
“Then that’s it, man.” Sam looks around the half-ruin they’re standing in. “He respects your agency. He came back for you. Adam, when he was talking to us, he talked through Cas, he was, I don’t know.” Sam’s eyes bore into Adam’s — not to pry, it turns out, but to reassure. “He cares about you.”  
  
“No, yeah, I know, I know,” Adam says in a rush and Sam nods. “That’s not what I meant. When it happened, it was more like, _I_ wanted to protect _him_. I’m just trying to make sense of it.” He frisks the hair at the back of his head, avoiding Sam’s eyes. Should have thought it through before initiating this little heart to heart. What kind of answers did he think he would find?  
  
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just needs to tell someone who won’t freak out. Sam definitely isn’t, he is just watching him, thoughtful.

“I’m happy for you, man,” Sam says at length, as if that takes them somewhere.  
  
  
***  
  
Adam keeps his eyes closed as Michael strokes his face, fingers gentle over eyelids, cheeks, chin and hair. They lie naked together in quiet, legs entwined loosely; it’s been hours but Adam doesn’t want to move or do anything else. His body is humming, spent but so alive. It has never felt like that, this physicality between them. It’s as if their separation has rebooted them to something far more enhanced – Michael and Adam two point oh, if you will. It is glorious, better than anything Adam has ever experienced.  
  
“I don’t know what I’ll do if we get separated again,” Adam murmurs for what must be the fifth time. Just like all previous times, Michael responds immediately, voice like gravel. “We won’t. I will never let that happen.”  
  
They’re back at the resort. Adam hadn’t wanted to stay in the house, already sensing one chapter of their life has reached its end. It had turned into a full-fledged feeling, once he collected his few belongings. ‘It’s time to leave this place,’ he told Michael simply. He couldn’t think of the next chapter yet, still can’t; he just wants some peace and quiet. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.  
  
Michael had nodded and then restored the house with a simple goddamn snap of his fingers. It left Adam dizzy with his sudden arousal. Maybe it was being apart, or maybe it was that outside perspective, the first Adam has ever had on Michael, but his awareness of him has shifted and magnified tremendously. Michael’s power and his might are like a gilded mantel. Adam still knows and wants the being underneath but to see Michael now, in his rightful glory, is amazing and drives Adam a little crazy with desire.  
  
Michael was as desperate for Adam as Adam was for him when they were alone at last, together in their old beach hut. In the tangle of their bodies and the heat of their mouths, in their breath fanning out to warm, or bring a shiver, or voice a guttural need, Adam had to hold on for dear life and even wonder, for a moment, if Michael’s passion for him was not, astonishingly, greater. That anything Michael feels or does is cosmic magnitudes _more_ compared to Adam has never been in question. But that Michael should have so much feeling for him?  
  
Yet it felt like he did.  
  
It feels like he does, if the light that zigzags through Adam with each reverent caress is anything to go by. The words bubble up in him without any warning, _I love you,_ and he is even taking a breath but Michael’s mouth is on his, drinking them in in their pure essence and Adam wraps his arms around him, lets Michael’s weight imprint the same message back into his every bone and every rib.


End file.
